Googlenet traffic now 6% of interwebs Google now handles more interwebs traffic than all but one of the world's ISPs, after gaining more than one per cent of the net's total traffic over the past nine months, according to data from network-security outfit Arbor Networks. In a blog post, Arbor chief scientist Craig Labovitz dubbed this a record traffic gain. "In …
With a company that huge handling a massive chunk of the world's information, surely there should also exist underground bunkers with hundreds of similarly dressed armed minions running about just waiting for a single British agent to drop in and blow the place up?
Does Eric Schmidt own a white cat?
It's terrifying to the part of me that likes competition in a corporate marketplace, the freedom to say and think what I like and the idea that government efforts to snoop on everyone all the time are hampered in part by the sheer number of different places they have to deal with to snoop!
6% of all the world's traffic through a single hub makes those ideals seem a little further out of reach. Furthermore, there is an entity out there that is larger! So there are two entites that between them accoutn for at least 12% of the ENTIRE WORLD'S information transit. If you don't find that vaguely distrubing, then i think you trust both corporations and governments just a little too much.
That 12+% isn't just some arbitrary random sample. It's specific data. Specifically, the 6% of Google traffic is all Google services (be it ads, gMail, analytics, searching, the bots indexing, or whatnot). The other 6+% is likely region-specific traffic as mentioned above.
So it's not like it's 12+% of YOUR data. If you don't trust Google, don't use their services, and it won't be any of your data in that 6%. If you don't trust a particular government, don't house any of your data in regions under their control and limit or prevent data from going through those regions [if you must (i.e, you don't trust your own government and don't/can't emigrate), use encryption.]
Internet traffic has always been concentrated through a few very busy hubs. At one time, just about all the traffic that went international passed through one of three US-based hubs (CIX, MAE east and MAE west - one of the MAEs went down in the late '90s or very early '00s and pretty much took out the entire Internet, as all the alternative routes couldn't cope with the volume of traffic).
And the traffic on Google's network is Google traffic. You don't like them, don't use their services. Simples.
There are many, many terrifying things in the world. This, I would contend, is not one of them.
GJC
It is become increasingly difficult to "just not use" Google. I contend you don't have the slightest idea what you are talking about in that regard. As to what is terrifying or not...that's in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I am a very avid student of history. Google is rising to a level of global information dominance that is starting to challenge that held by theocracies.
The ins and outs of that are not something I’ll debate online, (Sarah deserves a break,) but suffice it to say that I don’t hold Google in any esteem, I don’t trust Google, I don’t trust governments and I know that Google is legally required to work with governments to give up our data. (Not that Google fight that requirement very hard…)
The long and short of it is that every single time in human history that any one group or individual has obtained the power to control the flow of information as thoroughly as Google is coming to be able to, very bad things have happened. What is worse is that Google shows absolutely no tendencies towards “not being evil” and thus being even remotely trustworthy with the power they are accumulating. They simply aren’t ready to handle the “great responsibility.”
Combine this with the fact that the world’s various governments appear to have (some time ago) gone insane and I do not get the warm fuzzies. I do participate in political processes, work with dissidents and generally try to keep active making the world a better place. The more you get a global perspective on these matters, the more you realise how harsh total information control can be.
People in western countries simply cannot possibly comprehend it. They think that people in less fortunate countries are “just like them.” That these people believe the same things, desire the same things and are simply repressed by “the bad guys.” The reality is much different; in these countries, the general populace actually /support/ “the bad guys.” They believe the propaganda, heart and soul. They have simply never known anything else. They have been exposed to a certain set of information their entire lives – filled with it so thoroughly that to make an opposite claim seems to them to be ludicrous. Concepts we take for granted – like largish chunks of the UN declaration of Human Rights – are so foreign to them as to be absurd. IN their mind only the insane would believe such things.
In the western world we have fought many wars over the centuries in many different countries to lift ourselves out of that muck. Though the shadows are little longer today than twenty years ago, still…no one person or group can control the public consciousness to that extent.
Yet.
Google is getting damned close. I would rather they quite simply never get any closer than they are now. I don’t ever want any one person/group/organisation/government capable of controlling the public consciousness or opinion as thoroughly as a theocracy can. I do not want Google to remotest inkling of the tiniest sliver of possibility of ever becoming to the western world what the Catholic Church of the dark ages was to us.
So I am sorry, but to me Google’s growing control of information is terrifying.
The biggest network provider is probably China Telecom (or some accountancy-friendly variant, thereof). Arbor's "commercial reasons" for not divulging that fact probably relate to the huge contract, Arbor has, for maintaining network monitoring and filtering hardware within the China Firewall.
As for the "commercial reasons" for Arbor bigging-up the threat from Google? Google don't buy any of that kind of kit from Arbor, probably, and Arbor probably suspects Google of building that sort of hardware for itself. If that's true - and the Google network stays dark and keeps growing - Arbor will lose its place as 'snoop-supreme' of the Internet.
Everyone with a story to tell, has a reason for telling their story. The reason Arbor want to tell this story, is to encourage a big government-sized axe, to be taken to the Goggle network. Arbor have been doing deals with governments, for years, and would probably rather keep it that way. Governments are good customers - not like these threatening new pan-national corporates, like Google.
So, in a way, this story is as much about trying to maintain the status quo.
Anyone who thinks his enemy's-enemy, is his friend, has clearly never been in a Mexican stand-off, and none of the participants in this current stand-off over the control of the public Internet is called 'Robin Hood'.
It occurred to me that I had no concept of a quintillion bytes. Hardly surprising: it's usually called an exabyte (not to be confused with an exibyte). Still, that too isn't often a value I find between my mobile phone and the Xbox, since I'd really only gotten my head around a petabyte.
FYI: a quintillion bytes = 1 exabyte = 1 million terrabytes.
Now just imagine how much pr0n you could store on THAT!
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Google Bot. Why can't I just post the delta of any changes to my site into the internet search index? Be a hell of a lot more efficient than having the whole site crawled every 3 days. I serve more page requests to search bots than I do to real users! What percentage of web traffic is generated by bots?
You couldn't design a worse search index system!
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