Google to Create a Private Internet Alternative?

dbucowboy writes "Times Online UK reports that Google is working on a project to create its own global internet protocol network, a private alternative to the internet controlled by the search giant, according to sources who are in commercial negotiation with the company. Should Google successfully launch an alternative internet, it is theoretically possible for them to block out competitor websites and only allow users to access websites that have paid Google to be shown to their users." We discussed this topic during summer last year.

Other reports

Credible,

Sources report Google is starting it's own religion that will effectively replace all of the other religions in the world. Thus saving the world from itself.

And while they are at it reports are that each new coco-crisp cereal grain will contain a Google branded RFID device which will bring immediate live streaming video to the small intestines of those who eat it.

Brought to you by Google Rumor Central

Re:Other reports

Google is also reported to be setting up several small sovereign nations, strategically placed near backbones around the world. Google will provide its own infrastructure, including custom and open-source electricity distribution, custom wall sockets, and custom rules of the road for drivers.

beta?

Brought to you by Google Rumor Central

Isn't Google Rumor Central still a beta?

Riiiight...

"...it is theoretically possible for them to block out competitor websites and only allow users to access websites that have paid Google to be shown to their users." I don't see why this matters, or why it's worded how it is (seemingly to be scary or something). No one is going to force you to join this new protocol for their Internet, and if they develop it, what they do with it is their choice. I don't understand the seeming "concern" in the topic description.

Google planning to launch it's own rumour site!

Every day is another "Google planning launch it's own...."

They'll decline, and state that the new protocol is for internal use only, much like their OS

Intranet?

Sounds like a non-virtual private network, or perhaps an intranet.

Are they? Really?

Actually, I think that Google is simply trying to explore different possibilities for new business. This doesn't mean that they will come to pass, but at least they looked into the cost/benefit of the idea.

And who knows? Maybe they will do it. But just because they can doesn't mean they will.

Fortunately....

Fortunately, Google is run by people who are a little sharper than your average reporter.

Sure, Google could set up their own network, and only allow paid access to it. That is, assuming they learned nothing from Compuserve and Prodigy's attempts to do the same.

More likely, they want to build their own global back end.

Ragnarok

We've known about this for years. We even know the name before google does. It's gonna be Sky Net.

Rumors greatly exagerated....

Google to create its own Internet? Unlikely. The whole reason that Google is an important company is that it crawls through the publicly-accessible parts of the Internet in order to index its contents. If Google is to retain its premier position in the search engine market, then it will very much so remain firmly connected to the existing Internet. This is why I agree with the parent post: It is quite reasonable to believe that Google might require this bandwidth for its own purposes. There is nothing at all wrong with this. The Internet, after all, is merely a network of networks. All this means is that behind Google's accessible IP addresses lurks a mammoth network of its own.

I can't wait

I, for one, can't wait. Google will tell the big telcos to go shaft themselves, will give us all 6MB internet pipes for free, simple for agreeing to use the Google Browser which contains targeted ads. Yes, I would much rather trust my Internet in the hands of Google, than Comcast who is just itching to find a way to increase my monthly cable modem fee 5x the rate of inflation, and ATT whose CEO just want everyone to pay him for everything, regardless of whether he actually deserves it.

In other news...

Google changes it's name to SkyLab.

Skynet

If you were trying to make a Terminator reference, it's Skynet, not Skylab.

Skylab: 1970's orbiting space station:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab [wikipedia.org]

Skynet: 1980's science fiction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet [wikipedia.org]

Private backbone/VOIP

This actually sounds more like Google wanting their own private backbone then a new internet protocol.

Google needs to transfer large amounts of data through out the world and is probably looking for ways to reduce latency across the world. We have a private DS3 line from our office to our co-lo, wouldn't google want the same kind of thing at a large scale, and without having to deal with Sprint, Verison, or AT&T.

They could also use this for an VOIP solution as well, which to me is more likely. That way they can ship the voice calls on to the local phone switches throughout the country. I wouldn't be suprised to see Google offices going up all round the nation.

Going last mile and creating another internet is a huge endeavour that I don't think even google could take on. Leave that up to the telcom who are already in bed with the govt agencies required to do something like that.

But would this be -bad-?

I see lots of obvious things to be worried about, but at the same time, I see a few things that're actually not so bad. If Google were to go this route, the only question is how far they'd go. Could this network simply be a way for Google to slap down enough bandwidth for the "Google Cube" rumors, or would it be a wider-access thing intended for Total Domination? So far, Google hasn't gone evil despite the best efforts of many to try and call them out on it, and as long as there's a way to make any money and not be evil, I'm pretty sure Google would do it long before they'd consider anything else barring a stockholder revolt. (The only thing I can forsee being a true evil-catalyst)

Now on the other hand, with the Telcos getting all bitchy about Google and others using "their pipelines", I've been wondering just how long it might take for someone to start up an "OtherNet" so to speak, restricted to non-commercial use like the old days were. It might be slow, but you -can- get an unlimited-long-distance line and slap modems together, and combine that with a meshed wireless, etc.

Not a common carrier

Google isn't a common carrier, so who cares? My old school district created it's own private network and ran fiber to each school back to the central office and IT hub. They controled traffic on their fiber and they could block what ever they wanted, because they were not a common carrier.

-Rick

Hey!

I seem to remember someone predicting this might happen in the future [cnn.com], or at least something like it.

This is getting silly

Wouldnt it be easier to run storys about what google isnt doing?

Google Cube Collective

However, industry insiders fear that the development of a network of Google Cubes powered over a Google-owned internet network will greatly increase the power that Google wields...

You mean a network of Cubes like this? [stguardian.to]

Or The Real Security 2.0...

Yes, they could create an internet where competition is stifled and Bad Things happen. Easily.

Or they could create an internet where:

• Standards compliance is required.
• Secure protocols are not only the norm, but required.
• P2P and multicast technologies are the norm.
• The name system cannot be abused.
• Spam is impossible or economically unfeasible.
• Many current black hat attack methods are impossible.
• The government cannot trace your data traffic.
• The common language and its development model are suitable for delivering richly interactive applications (rather than a series of kludges bolted onto a hypertext document language).

I, for one, welcome our potential Google overlords. They can't stifle competition too much, or there won't be businesses willing to populate Google's new internet. Commercial acceptance would be necessary for such a thing to even hope to supplant the Internet. The Internet won't live forever. I'd be more happy with Google engineering the replacement than with some of the other big players of our time.

Re:Or The Real Security 2.0...

Nail on the head. So many of the awful things we're stuck with today on the internet are because of design decisions made when resources were scarce, or problems were not envisioned - I've always said that the only way to fix it is to throw most of it away and start again. TCP, IP, all old and flawed.

Re:Or The Real Security 2.0...

Maybe they're just rolling out IPv6 for the masses?

Dreaming,
-l

Sad

It is sad how people get paranoid over Google. Just because they are huge, have tons of money, and great ambition doesn't mean that they are going to abuse their power.

Argue all you want about Google in China or anything else. Simple matter of the fact is that if the paranoid stand in the way of a company's ambitions, they risk destroying a beautiful advance in technology and living. If they don't stand in the way and Google starts censoring the competition, people will switch back to Comcast or Time Warner and Google will lose a ton of money for the costs of starting up the service but not making enough revenue off of it.

This reminds me of the paranoid trying to stop the government from putting Fluoride in the water supply. Can't they spend their time in a more productive way than fighting progress?

Well, the last 20 Google rumors turned out false..

But I have a good feeling about this one!!!

Google private backbone

Google is not turning itself into a new version of AOL or Compuserve. Google is, however, quietly building out its own network infrastructure. Right now anyone who wants to can do BGP peering with Google at any NAP it happens to have built out to. What does this buy them?

Let's say that I'm a mid size ISP (I happen to work for one so this is a first hand account) and I peer with Google at a regional NAP. What happens then? Any traffic between my network and Google's network will cross that peering point. As a result, I don't have to pay one of my upstream ISP's for bandwidth to Google. Google, in turn, doesn't have to pay their upstream ISP's for bandwidth to my customers. Everyone wins (except for the upstream ISP's of course).

Any large network operator is already doing this kind of thing on a large scale. Google is already doing this. The reason they bought all of that dark fiber is so they can do it without having to rent a bunch of OC-48's from the phone company in order to make it happen. There is no secret, so stop trying to figure it all out.

Or...

Or instead of nephariously trying to create a tiered controller internet, they might be trying to have some muscle to back against the current internet-pipe-giants who keep spinning their mouths off about doing just such. That might fit with Google's recent press & hubub about telling the we-want-to-rape-your-netizen-rights companies to shove off, ya think?

Perhaps google might use all this dark fiber its been buying (because its almost literally too cheap not to after all the crap we put in) to create indeed a private internet, but a private internet immune to the bullshit of the dumb-ass know-nothing dirt-eating baby-killing devil-worshipping feces-tossing telco's. If anyone, google as a company understands the value of the network as a dumb pipe. If anyone, Page&Brin have the wherewithal to go crusading for that. Its not a bad place in the history books. "I formed a massive fucking company" v. "I singlehandedly protected an entirely new form of of democratic adhocracy and free exchange from being anally raped by big buisness!"

Look, I loved beating down on Google when Google Chat wasnt federating. Nice big technical slipup. But the google bashing has gone a little far. They got the bad press for BushCo's wiretapping, when they were one of the two to deny the information. They're getting this bad press for the China incident, but its the chinese. You cant tell them no, we're not going to censor information. They're a totalitarian state, I dont care how much fiber google owns, they shoot people for that over there.

Give em a chance, Google is still immensely young. Think before you criticize.

Myren

sounds like a journalist trying to make a story

I bet that some of the facts are accurate, but the interpretation is informed more by the writer's deisre to create a "good story" that fits a well established pattern, rather than any informed analysis.

Google may well be building a global network. They may well be planning on opening it to consumers and they are no doubt doing it to serve their business interests. That doesn't mean they have to lock out their "competitors" for such an investment to be worthwhile.

A huge reason for them to make that kind of investment is so they have a lever against network providers (like AT&T) who think they deserve some of Google's revenue. They don't even necessarily have to do a complete build out, they just need the ability to reach a significant number of AT&Ts subscribers and be able to make a creditable threat they can extend their reach in the future and old Ed Whitacre is likely to change his tune. Google's ace in the hole is that they can subsidize access with ad revenues, which has got to scare the shit out of a telco guy even more than the idea of free long distance.

Re:Google Fanboyism at it's whackiest

I almost can't wait for Google's facade of goodness to slip.

Already done, in my opinion, the moment I first saw a Google Flash ad for McDonalds.

I use adblocking plugins and specifically left Google ads unblocked due to their nature. No longer. Ugh.

Re:Google Fanboyism at it's whackiest

Flash and image ads in themselves are not evil things. Let me restate that.

Flash and image ads - in themselves - are not evil.

What's evil are the ones that are large sizes, that encroach on the rest of the page, and that are designed to try and subvert your control over either the design of your website or the functionality of your browser. Google has some very interesting guidelines [google.com.au] in place to prevent the obnoxious features of flash or image ads from being used through their system.

Images must be under 50K - and this includes Flash ads.

Nothing can extend outside the proscribed space given to the ad.

Text and images need to be clear and distinct.

The user bar offering links back to the site will be provided by Google (probably so they can keep accurate track of the clicks)

Still no links to pop-up spawning pages allowed.

And one of my favorite lines in the list:

"Your ad should not contain universal call-to-action phrases such as 'click here,' 'link here,' 'visit this link,' 'this site is,' or other similar phrases that could apply to any ad, regardless of content."

It seems to me like Google is actually trying to take the evil -out- of flash and image-based ads.

Re:Google Fanboyism at it's whackiest

If you're that concerned about web browsing stealing your computing cycles for a compile, why do you even leave your browser open at all? Good gods, man. You DO know that computers suitable for web browsing are reallllly cheap, especially used?

Also, I'd point you to the part of Google's guidelines that limits flash ad animation time to three-cycles only, of a max 30 seconds duration, before stopping. This is most likely designed to prevent the kind of CPU-sapping you're talking about.

(Disclaimerish Thing: I have four machines on my desk right now, with a dual-proc server in the corner. Web browsing is pretty manageable for me.)

Re:Google Fanboyism at it's whackiest

You know, there's a great feature of all modern preemptively multitasking operating systems: priorities. Whenever the OS is looking for programs that need CPU time, it always goes to the one with the highest priority. This priority is inherited by any new child processes.

On Windows, you can use the Task Manager to set the priority of currently running processes, and the start.exe program to set the priority upon launch (see start /? for details). For example, set the shortcut for launching your favorite browser to "start /low <rest of command line> and it'll start with low priority.

On Linux and many unicies the program nice is used to start a new program with a different priority. Set your browser lanuching command line to nice <rest of command line> for the default lower of priority. See man nice(1) for details.

This should fix the effect that the flash ads running in the brower have on your compilations, but won't help with heat or power consumption (the brower will still be churning the rest of the time). Like you mentioned, that's what adblock/flashblock are for; prevent them from running in the first place.

Re:Google Fanboyism at it's whackiest

Flash ads and all animated gifs are inherently evil. Let me restate that.

Flash ads and all animated gifs - are - inherently evil.

Sound or no sound, flash is a resource hog, even on high-end systems. Don't even get me started on how many times a flash page crashed firefox either. Uninstalling flash has improved by browsing experience immensely.

Any animation in an ad is evil. I don't care if it's a 1x1 banner that switches between blue and light blue every 30 seconds, it's evil. There should be nothing moving or changing on my screen unless I direct it to. My eye is involuntarily drawn to movement, and it's just painful to try and ignore. Text ads or static images are an order of magnitude more tolerable than any animated gif.

Re:Google Fanboyism at it's whackiest

"Evil"

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Google Fanboyism at it's whackiest

"Any animation in an ad is evil. I don't care if it's a 1x1 banner that switches between blue and light blue every 30 seconds, it's evil. There should be nothing moving or changing on my screen unless I direct it to. My eye is involuntarily drawn to movement, and it's just painful to try and ignore. Text ads or static images are an order of magnitude more tolerable than any animated gif."

You seem to be a particularly sensitive individual. The ads pay for the free or low-cost resources you consume on the Internet. If you don't like it, use FlashBlock/AdBlock or don't use the service. No one is forcing you do use these websites. If the majority of the websurfers feel that the ads are too intrusive, the site will die.

Re:Google Fanboyism at it's whackiest

Sound or no sound, flash is a resource hog, even on high-end systems.

Where do you guys come up with this stuff?

That's like saying "JPEG is a resource hog" -- because the 30 megapixel image you downloaded from NASA was kinda slow.

Sure, Flash *can* be a resource hog, just like any other programmable environment. But don't blame Flash -- blame the ad network (Google?) for accepting a poorly-written SWF.

Well-written SWF is actually remarkable CPU-efficient.

It's just them protecting themselves from Telcos

From what I know of Google, this is more likely an effort to insulate themselves from the nut bags at Qwest, SBC, etc... who are throwing around the idea of charging a premium price for high-speed packet priority over the Internet. I wouldn't worry about it. Go Google!

Re:It's just them protecting themselves from Telco

This is exactly my thought. With SBC threatening to charge Google for access to customers - while also charging customers for access to the net and therefor Google, this is exactly the kind of thing that Google needs to be doing to protect themeself.

So should we. Screw the telco - community networks of wireless boxes that guarantee end to end unfettered service I believe is the way to go. American's are too passive in their willingness to pay monthly *service* fees on things like cable, telephone, cell, virus protection, fire walling, financial software, etc....

We've got the power - or you can get it easily for $25 (a simple WAP) - why aren't we building connections that don't touch the telcos network?

-CF

Re:Google Fanboyism at it's whackiest

I heard google is in talks to create their own universe.

Re:Google Fanboyism at it's whackiest

if I was stranded on a desert island and could only pick one website to bring with me, Yahoo would be it

Seems like Yahoo has found a new way to advertize ;)

Re:Google Fanboyism at it's whackiest

- than about taking care of their end-users.

Actually, they are taking care of their end users: The advertisers.

To quote from Blade Runner: "I'm not in the business, Mr. Deckard. I am the business." We who use Google products aren't the end users. We're the product that Google sells to the advertisers. It's the same with any other advertiser or advertising-supported medium.

I don't understand why that's so hard for people to figure out.

Re:Google Fanboyism at it's whackiest

We who use Google products aren't the end users. We're the product that Google sells to the advertisers. It's the same with any other advertiser or advertising-supported medium.

I don't understand why that's so hard for people to figure out.

Maybe because it's a naive viewpoint that others don't agree with?

People that use Google's products are end-users, by the very definition.

If Google's products sucked, no one would USE them. Clearly they do not suck.

Advertisers pay for your use of the service, since you do not.

Therefore it is an even exchange that benefits everyone:

(a) You get access to a product you enjoy without paying for it.
(b) Advertisers get the opportunity to sell you their products.
(c) Google makes enough money to pay their expenses and earn a nice profit.

Sorry if there's not enough hyperbole in that description for you.

Re:Google Fanboyism at it's whackiest

I almost can't wait for Google's facade of goodness to slip. They're just like any other large company who are more concerned about their stock price and making money - than about taking care of their end-users. For example, they still don't have an email service that isn't plastered with advertising (even for a small fee) - which ought to be a clue that they're an advertising company first, functionality is secondary. If Google went dark tomorrow the extent would be to click Firefox over to using Teoma or Yahoo as the default search engine. I'd barely notice. As reluctant I am to admit it, Yahoo is still the single most important suite of web services to me, and I'd be lost without it (if I was stranded on a desert island and could only pick one website to bring with me, Yahoo would be it). (And now that I think about it, I wonder how many of these "Google is doing X" posts are purely to try and keep their stock price artificially inflated.)

Where did you get this information, or did you make it up?

I have heard nothing from Google employees about them caring about their stock price, and I posted this yesterday [slashdot.org]:

"The funny thing is that Google's owners and employees are probably the least concerned with their profits. Sergey that is one of the original two founders of the company works for a $1/year, drives a lavish Toyota Prius, lives in a small apartment, usually wears blue jeans, and is _personally_ worth $7 to $11 billion dollars."

Oh, and you want to compare Google's ads to any other company on the net? Take a look at the plain text ads, then go to any other website, including Yahoo!, and get dizzy from the animated gifs and/or flash ads. Oh, and while your at it, check out Google's philosophy:

http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html [google.com]

I have not heard, nor seen any deviation from those 10 things, and I've never seen annoying ads on any of Google's services. Aside from the daily free ads that Slashdot gives Google, I've never heard some goofball yodeling "Google!" on TV, but have that for Yahoo!

Nice troll.