A few weeks ago, someone introduced me to Google’s ‘Project Loon’. I’d never heard of it before, so checked it out properly:
(here’s that ‘someone’s’ website. Damn good web designer and what he doesn’t know about Google isn’t worth knowing)
I actually find this video really creepy – not least for the cutesy, all-American child’s voiceover and charming illustrations, persuading me that this is to help all the world’s people.
And I find the concept of the whole project to be creepy. Expose the whole world to the internet, and suddenly you have access to all of those new people, all of their data… and you have control of them / the world.
The whole promo video actually feels like an advanced, two-minute long rebuttal of all the accusations that could thrown at Google for setting up this project.
Someone once said to me that Google would, in future, be the equivalent of ‘Skynet’, from the Terminator films. Things like Project Loon make me wonder just how far from the truth that statement actually is.
Having said that… this is an absolutely phenomenal idea, to try to make the world a better place, harnessing the power of Google (I know that, sometimes, it’s a pain to be bothered to view links, but please follow the previous one – I guarantee that the idea shown will blow your socks off).
The long and short of it, is the introduction of a ‘green switch’ on Google, which means that companies are ranked by their green credentials as well as SEO (or rather, their green credentials form part of their SEO).
Companies who are already environmentally conscious, would simply need to keep doing what they’re doing, to rank well. Other companies would have to play catch-up, in terms of their ‘green’ policies, if they wanted to rank as well as they had done previously: a kind of environmental-based coercion.
If you follow that link, above, you’ll see how well thought out the rest of the idea is: it’s seamless.
There you have it though: Google for good, Google for evil.