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Google greases the skids for the GDrive

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 30th, 2009 at 03:10 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Google is readying for what is possibly their most bandwidth-intensive Internet service yet: The Google Drive is reported to be a planned service to let people store all their data on Google’s servers, but access it all like a disk drive from their own home computers.

Services like Youtube and Picasa already transfer large amounts of data, but the GDrive conceivably would mean the continuous, two-way transfer of gigabytes of data, rivaling Bittorrent in the strain that an ordinary user might routinely put on an Internet connection. Clearly, any plans ISPs have to make their users pay for what bandwidth they use would put a crimp into this plan.

Enter the Google’s ever more cozy relationship with the Obama Administration. After leaving “Miserable Failure” as a search term that leads to President Bush for about four years, Google took less than four weeks to disarm the “Googlebomb” now that it’s aimed at President Obama.

Is there any serious question that this change in speed was motivated by a desire to curry favor with the new President on “Net Neturality,” or specifically plans that Google promotes that would prohibit ISPs from charging customers for what they use? I think not.

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  • http://www.phxgonline.com phxg

    that most ISP’s are now implementing bandwidth caps and content throttling this would be a major reason for any internet development group to lobby the government.

    But with the rumors of his “Google Enabled Government” and appointment of the first ever (Cabinet level?) CTO rumored to be Google CEO Eric Schmidt who has openly supported Obama this could be more then just lobbying, but the opening overture of integration.

    The Googlebomb thing though has hacked me off completely because it shows where the Google loyalty lies. And I suspect when Obama is decimated in 2012, google will reinstate the “miserable failure” hit on whom ever is the next republican president.

  • 6eorge Jetson

    Yes, we do need to be sure that the market is able to charge by cost-effective measures of supply-and-demand (there are no Google free rides when practical mechanisms exist to allocate the costs of usage).

    But in terms of getting worked up just about Google, note that Amazon already offers its EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) webservices (targeted at businesses).
    Microsoft has it’s 2010 Windows Azure platform in the works.
    Perhaps Ebay has a sufficiently sophisticated infrastructure to throw its hat in the ring.

    I think the issues raised in this paragraph will definitely slow all-or-nothing adoption

    It is this prospect that alarms critics of Google’s ambitions. Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, a charity defending computer users’ liberties, did not dispute the convenience offered, but said: “It’s a little bit like saying, ‘we’re in a dictatorship, the trains are running on time.’ But does it matter to you that someone can see everything on your computer? Does it matter that Google can be subpoenaed at any time to hand over all your data to the American government?”

    Further, I think Microsoft’s story is underated here, as it is planning to support computing either onsite or “in the cloud”. For most established companies, going from point A to Z in steps seems to offer better business utility than risking a one time leap.

    And as noted in the article, then there are the lawyers. In some situations, I wouldn’t be surprised if leaving unencrypted data on someone else’s site is against the law, much less a huge legal risk. And there’s always the dreaded local backhoe that could shut down a local business.

    I don’t think this is a one-size fits all situation, either for Google, or even the ISPs. If I’m John Doe storing my vacation pictures in the cloud, I want cheap access, and I’m not willing to pay for high bandwidth nor guaranteed 24/7 uptime. If I’m a business and any downtime for my website systems costs me, say, thousands per minute, I’ll demand multiple backups, high bandwidth, and I’ll be willing to pay for that (from both Google and from the ISPs).

    There’s a lot more to this than just raw storage.

  • bs

    that I ever store my personal information on some “big computer in the sky”. No way.

    The “Don’t Do Evil” bunch is right up there with the Obama administration for a group that I don’t trust as far as I can throw ‘em.

  • http://www.scottbomb.com scottbomb

    This idea has never really caught on and I don’t see why it would. Who’s going to trust some other company with servers who-knows-where with their sensitive data? I carry 2 USB drives, 8 GB and 4 GB, PLENTY of space for all my documents and pictures. Then there’s the laptop. And when I’m away from home, I have logmein.com connect me to the home PC as if I were right there and it doesn’t cost a dime.

  • 10ksnooker

    This is just stupid, especially if you have real data to keep secure. I would only put toy stuff on line.

  • Caleb (absentee)

    -nt

  • ss396

    “If I?m John Doe storing my vacation pictures in the cloud, I want cheap access, and I?m not willing to pay for high bandwidth nor guaranteed 24/7 uptime.”

    Amen, George, amen.

    I work in a lot of places that don’t have high-speed internet access, and it is exceedingly frustrating trying to browse the web. Even where I am now, I supposedly have 100MB connection; but it’s crappy service, and it will be this way for years; decades, even. Security issues and trustworthiness aside, I am not going to put my work out where it is going to be nigh unto impossible to retrieve it.

  • http://jeffemanuel.net Jeff Emanuel