Growing Google

From the Financial Post, Google: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet

…Google is interested in so much more than that. It has reportedly approached the Federal Communications Commission recently about obtaining wireless spectrum…

Google Inc. has been putting together a massive cable network to provide customers around the world with telecommunications services ranging from broadband Internet to home and mobile phones…

For at least the past three years, the company has been buying up swaths of unused fibre-optic cable — so-called “dark fibre” — around the world…

The company is estimated to have between 40 and 70 data centres filled to the brim with computing and storage power, with at least five new facilities under construction in the United States alone. By comparison, Canada’s second-largest telephone company Telus Corp., has eight…

recent reported moves have been even more indicative of its move into telecommunications. Rumours surfaced this week that the company is looking to buy GrandCentral Communications, a Web startup that allows users to consolidate their different home, work and mobile phone numbers into one through an Internet application…

Google may not want to be a phone company per se, Mr. Surtees says, but the old definition of what a phone company is no longer applies. Just as Google redefined search and advertising, so too is the company changing the definition of telecommunications.

This makes questioning Google’s foreign policy a bit more interesting.

(h/t KurzweilAI.net)

Posted in ICT

2 thoughts on “Growing Google

  1. interesting article, though lots that isn’t new.most interesting part: Google as post-telco service provider. bring it on.
    saw you got this at Kurzweil. where do you stand on the singularity?

  2. Ah, Singularity, the belief that technology can create “smarter-than-human intelligence.” As a technologist by training (real-world not university), I’m not convinced humans won’t evolve their control mechanisms to manage this.I remembero one commentator on the KurzweilAI.net website, while speaking on the topic of military usage of better-than-human intelligence, remarked how this would likely lead to computers abstaining from “stupid/silly” war games. What makes him think the anarchic world will turn rosy with greater intelligence? Gatekeeper and Guardian states, for example, do not subscribe to different notions because of intelligence, but because of how the elites want to seek power.
    These means of emulating humans and other creatures are steps on the golden road, but they do not necessarily herald the elimination of the little man behind the curtain.

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