According to Slashdot, Google may be running up to 100,000 servers. Google's economic innovation was to capture the opinions of the general linking public as proxies for endorsement, rather than use an army of paid taxonomists and evaluators like Yahoo did. (The other search engines that solely relied on the page describing itself are already distant memories we can joke to our grandkids about.)
So if you want to do in Google, here's the next step: replace the expensive 100,000 central servers with a distributed search engine. We've already seen a scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scractch-yours model succeed with BitTorrent. Your download speed depends on your upload generosity.
An unintended consequence of the remote attestation feature of trusted computing is a strengthening of peer-to-peer networking. This feature lets me know the program running on your computer is the one I think it is, not just one that can spoof the protocol. So if you want to receive a cut of the advertising revenue, you had better be doing your fair share of crawling the Web, assembling a distributed index, and answering queries from nearby nodes. No chance of gaming the system.
Many fear the opposite: increased central control over the edge. The usual story of the technology not being evil, just the use you put it to.
Of course, Bill Gates might be even more evil than we ever thought, and in future Windows will be free, but the encryption key to use the remote attestation feature will cost you big time. But whatever happens, the current balance between the center and the edge is likely to come under stress.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 2:46 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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