There has been so mush online and offline - old media - discussion of Google's decision to acquiesce to the Chinese government and cut out search results for certain keywords to Chinese citizens that I am not going to go it all here. It doesn't even make sense to add a bunch of links. You can find all you want out there. My take though is this is not a Google issue, at least not at its base and at least not entirely. This is the Internet crashing against the walls of reality. MSN, Yahoo and now Google have all felt the wall. The Internet backbone itself has hit a wall; not the reality of government coercion necessarily, but the reality of human treachery, laziness and stupidity. Case in point, the huge amount of spam that the backbone has been forced to process over the years, with no real sign of abatement. Not to mention the increasingly nasty world of Internet porn and other cancers. The Internet was supposed to be this wide open space where everyone was invited and all manner of knowledge and wisdom and all things great and human could be shared. We jumped on board, businesses and consumers and some interesting things happened, no doubt. And a lot of new and great things are added everyday. But this may turn out to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Now that real value has started to happen on the internet, everything from news and blogs to e-commerce and Web 2.0 applications, you wonder if there won't come a point where we all have too much invested in a system that is constantly under attack from spammers and hackers and worm writers. We and many others have predicted that Software as a Service, on-demand computing, is going to take off and change the enterprise IT landscape permanently, much as relational databases replaced the flat file systems, much as client server replaced the dumb terminal. When SaaS does become mainstream and more businesses rely on the Internet for their computing network, then there will be a greater imperative that the Internet work perfectly, as it necessarily must. There will be less patience for spam and all the other nonsense that stresses the Internet today. The Internet has just started to run into the reality of the world. I would expect significant changes over the next many years as we, consumers and businesses, begin to address Internet issues. I am not a toadie for Google, though we do use their Adwords product, but it's useless to sit back and say they caved in. All of us will sooner or later have to deal with the fact that the Internet has some issues - with reality, no less. |
