Great technology news or frightening Google power grab?

Google is expanding their business, but they may find that it is problematical to run two different businesses.

Google seems to know how to use their place as the leading internet powerhouse responsibly.

Microsoft tends to compete through shady business practices rather than remaining competitive.Whenever they’re given power, they abuse it—Office prices are ridiculous, Windows saw little improvement for a decade because they faced little competition, and IE has been attrocious for most of its existence. They tried to crush Netscape using business rather than competing in the actual arena. Once they gain power, they exploit it.

Google has traditionally done an excellent job using its position responsibly. Google contributes very heavily to the open source software that it depends on—Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, is employed with salary and benefits at Google to do nothing Google specific other than contribute to Python and make Python better. Not to mention, the team at Google working on Unladen Swallow, a project aiming to make Python much faster, with the ultimate goal of getting the code merged back into the core Python distribution.

Google’s Chromium project, while mostly self serving, also makes large contributions to the WebKit project, and their V8 engine is completely open source. Google gives most of its advancements for free, since these are tools they use to build the products they do, not the products themselves.

The company’s motto is “Don’t be evil”, which reflects their responsible use of their power.

With that being said, something like this isn’t going to be exactly easy for the company. The FCC has a number of ways that it classifies telecommunication services. It won’t be so easy for Google to simply overbuild a fiberoptic network and control access to it exclusively. It will likely be subject to regulation, and Google may have to open up their pipes to allow others to use the bandwidth as well.

I would far sooner pay money to Google for internat access than Comcast.

Talk about evil. Comcast is a monopolistic empire which does everything it can to nickel and dime people to death. The Roberts family which owns Comcast are a bunch of crooks. Most of their shenanigans don’t make the national news but if one lives in the Philly area (their home base) there is plenty of into in the local papers b

So if it were a choice between Google and Comcast… Not even close. Google.