Google's Grand Grab -- Beyond Latitude, Earth, And MarsGoogle's Grand Grab -- Beyond Latitude, Earth, And Mars

Google has been on its usual tear, demonstrating its propensity to roll out ever newer and funkier visual mashups -- Earth 5.0 and Latitude being just the latest. (What's next, Google Bailout to track the distribution of TARP money?) What this activity masks is a bigger issue that's brewing: how larger can Google get before its bubble bursts, and, more important, what's the ultimate destination of the search-engine giant?Relatively minor products like Google Latitude as well as more significant efforts like Earth 5.0 are simply sideshows to the main event. That would be Google's implementation of its prime mission, which is to digitalize all of humankind's knowledge.

Read Robert Darnton's valuable "Google & the Future," in the New York Review of Books, if you can (make it through the whole piece, that is), for a deep dive into the subject. Though larded up with quasi-academic jargon and a boring historical digression, Darnton makes the case that Google's digitization of millions of books is going to open up a new age of Enlightenment.

(Forget for a moment that we live in an instant-gratification, rather than a reflective, society. Possibly the economic reset of which Steve Ballmer speaks will elevate the latter in the face of the unavailability of the former, except when you're talking oatmeal.)

Anyway, so the rub is that Google as a company is culturally torn when it comes to its mission. (It's torn on the output side, not the input side. The input part is "we will digitize everything"; it's down with that and there are no questions, internally or amongst us outsiders, as to what the deal is here.)

That "outside" conflict of which I speak revolves around Google's societal responsibilities. Google always has appeared publicly conflicted about its desire to make craploads of money. (Hey, this is admirable. You don't hear the folks at Exxon wringing their hands about whether they get enough warm fuzzies from average Americans.)

One the one hand, Google wants to do what it wants to do. (For example, digitizing millions of copyrighted works prior to ironing out the legal details with authors and publishers.) At the same time, Google, in the form of its public representatives, seems to get upset whenever its motives are questioned.

As an outgrowth of the book-digitizing deal, Google is going to place one terminal in every participating research library, which allows users to fully search. . . well, everything. The whole corpus of human knowledge, which it has digitally scanned into its computing cloud. This is where that Google-enabled New Age of Enlightenment comes in.

Truly, this will be great news, for students everywhere. Except. Except, it's not such great news for, say, students who don't go to Harvard, and thus don't have access to that university's research library.

It's also not such great news for the nonparticipating libraries, or for the students queued up behind that one free terminal. Google, you see, will likely charge for other terminals. That's where the "craploads of money" stuff I wrote about earlier comes in.

Not that this is bad. Google has a right to make money. But only one terminal?

What I'm wondering here is whether, long term, Google is moving from today's democratized situation where all its stuff is searchable, into a future which once again bifurcates knowledge into the haves and the have-nots.

I want a 12-year-old middle-school student at the Queens Borough Public Library in Flushing, N.Y., to have the same access as does a future cabinet member attending Harvard.

I don't think many people are thinking about this issue; the Internet is not so much about neatly planning the future. As well, attempts at regulating the Internet are doomed to failure. (All you get is clueless regulators on one side shouting at free-at-all-costs advocates on the other side. Nothing gets accomplished.)

In conclusion, though, I'm guessing Google has thought all these angles through. All I'm saying is, we should, too.

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Alex Wolfe is editor-in-chief of information.com.