For a while now it has been known that Google is buying “dark fibre”, fibre optics cables which have never been connected because of the tech industry’s downturn of year 2000. There have been many speculations regarding the reason Google is doing this. The picture is starting to clear up as Google is apparently trying to create an alternative Internet.
This reminded me that Microsoft once tried to create an alternative internet. This network was called MSN, and was different from the MSN that we know today. If you wanted to connect to MSN you had to use your dialup modem to call a different network that was not the Internet. Needless to say, this attempt failed.
Now that Google is losing its shine in the eyes of the public (privacy concerns, products which failed to impress like Google Video) it will be interesting to see if they can really attract a critical mass of users to an alternate internet.