Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks an Expansion of Power

The complex, sprawling like an information-age factory, heralds a substantial expansion of a worldwide computing network handling billions of search queries a day and a growing repertory of other Internet services.

And odd as it may seem, the barren desert land surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border — at the intersection of cheap electricity and readily accessible data networking — is the backdrop for a multibillion-dollar face-off among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that will determine dominance in the online world in the years ahead.

[...] “Google wants to raise the barriers to entry by competitors by making the baseline service very expensive,” said Brian Reid, a former Google executive who is now director of engineering at the Internet Systems Consortium in Redwood City, Calif.

[...] Today even the closest Google watchers have lost precise count of how big the system is. The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world. The company has major operations in Ireland, and a big computing center has recently been completed in Atlanta. Connecting these centers is a high-capacity fiber optic network that the company has assembled over the last few years.

And maybe it is … but when has that stopped Congress in the past? Senate likely to spurn Web firms in fee battle [pdf]

The Senate probably will reject rules sought by Internet companies including Google Inc. that bar telephone and cable companies from charging users more for priority network access, Senator Ted Stevens said.

The House of Representatives’ rejection of so-called “network neutrality” rules last week in a 269-152 vote “shows what the Congress wants to do,” he said yesterday.

[...] “When it comes to interfering with the marketplace, in terms of major expenditures of capital, I think we should stay away,” Stevens said during the hearing.