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• 2/11/2010 3:59 PM Anonymous wrote:
  
  Written by a smart friend, and all true:
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  Why do I get the feeling that Google will be scraping my traffic for keywords and offering my information to foreign governments?
  
  Google is not the only option: fiber represents the longest-term investment in Internet service - there are many competitors rushing to install fast fiber.
  
  http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-our-experimental.html
  
  This is filled with vague, advertising daydreams. Take a look:
  
  "Imagine sitting in a rural health clinic, streaming three-dimensional medical imaging over the web and discussing a unique condition with a specialist in New York."
  
  So they're suggesting that a rural clinic (presupposing much - the more rural, the less likely they are to have fast Internet access or equipment to generate 3D medical imaging that nobody in rustic "Whiskeyville" can read). Anyway, let's say my mother has a unique condition, a spot of threatening tissue on one of her organs. Our loved ones are there, and we're all crying and tense. We don't know if she has a week to live, or less, but we now are able to pay an East Coast consultant $2500 per hour to look at data without meeting the patient. Is she supposed to be jubilant about bits whizzing around? How rural are you going to get when they plan to offer service to "at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people."
  
  "Or downloading a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes." Doesn't everyone already do this via torrent? Ask yourself why you'd want to download a movie in less time than it takes to watch it? To take it somewhere else and watch it? Streaming video (netFlix, hulu, etc) suffices.
  
  "Or collaborating with classmates around the world while watching live 3D video of a university lecture." ...because that's what's missing from lectures, 3D video! How did we ever survive until today without 3-D video? It's like we've learned nothing all of these pre-3D movie years. 3D is a fad which has been coming in and out of fashion since roughly 1840.
  
  Don't kid yourself. Your input as an "interested community" will be heard but the real decisions will be made as capitalists have always done: by marketing information - "which communities have the most valuable information to scrape?" - and which congressional districts offer the greatest benefits. (Yes, Google has lobbyists).
  
  Please also consider passing on the word to other contacts in the MIT/Harvard community.
  
  Please consider balancing the pipedreams with my level-headed, experienced viewpoint (7+ years in the networking industry, including modems, and 40Gbps fiber at U.S. Robotics, 3Com, Avici, and working very closely with AT&T.). We should be lucky to be passed over in this experiment, because having our community cluttered and burdened with short-term, experimental, poorly-supported infrastructure will cause more pain than its worth. (Remember early DSL?) Let them test their new artificial sweetener on someone else.
  
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