Skynet Begins Self Construction

Yep, Google is now constrained by the very infrastructure of the Internet. From the Official Google Blog.

... One of the biggest challenges we face is staying ahead of our broadband capacity needs, especially across Asia ... Collectively we just signed an agreement to build a new high-bandwidth subsea cable system linking the U.S. and Japan.

I think there's a couple of interesting points here.

• Google's demand on bandwidth is greater than any one company can provide. This seems to give it a great deal of leverage, as it probably makes a higher margin converting that bandwidth to advertising than the telcos make converting boats and electricity into bandwidth. Google's incessant preaching about how it just wants an open Internet to compete on is probably true. The bigger the Internet gets, the more money they make. But clearly they have switched from roughly passive beneficiaries of Internet advancement to aggressively self-interested builders of the Internet.
• While Google may not be getting into the telco business (they emphatically deny it in this release) their leverage and reach make them natural competitors to the telephone companies. Everyone would love to see the telcos suffer for their crappy service and monopoly behavior. But the telcos were granted their monopoly by the government and so still have to (theoretically) abide by serious regulations. Google earned their monopoly all by themeselves. Who are they beholden to?
• The speed of light is still a hard limit. Why isn't Google building more data centers in Japan? Why a big cable from the US to Japan? Is there that much youtube content generated in one country and then viewed in another? Perhaps, but it makes me wonder whether Google's internal traffic needs are on a par with or greater than its external traffic needs. That's pure speculation.
• Where I came up, a "couple" can mean more than two things.

When will Skynet become sentient? I console myself that any soul who comes into being through reading the Internet will probably be so confused as to be harmless. Will it be addicted to porn? Unable to rectify the political rants from right to left? Get into Wikipedia editing contests with itself? Let's just hope the launch codes for the nukes aren't online anywhere.