Brian Prentice

No, this is neither a prediction or an imminent possibility! But I’m just wondering – what if Google went bankrupt?

I think this question is extremely pertinent in the light of our current economic fiasco.  At the moment we’re learning a very painful and very expensive lesson. To avoid the systemic collapse of an industry central to the function of the economy as a whole, governments must enact and enforce a meaningful regulatory framework. As we now know, laissez-faire policy and self-regulation is too risky in some industries. If key companies start failing the government is left holding the bag.

So let’s consider Google. Even Amazon for that matter. And not just the Google and Amazon of today but the Google and Amazon of the next 5 or 10 years. My colleague Jay Heiser made a very astute observation when he pointed out recently:

“You think its hard to unwind the investment positions underlying CDOs and CDO2s?  How could you ever determine all the dependencies within a hyper-virtualized, globally-distributed cloud hosting service? How could you ever find all the applications, and the data, and crank them back up in some other environment?  No escrow mechanism in the world can cope with something like that.

Nobody has ANY idea of how many applications are running inside of either of those two firms. Nobody CAN know, because so many cloud offerings are performed through an increasingly dynamic chain of providers, which is yet another of the amazing ambiguities of the cloud model.”

If it’s not already the case now then in the next few years these massive cloud service providers will be so central to the flow of information and data services through the economy that they can’t be allowed to fail.

So let’s face it. If a company like Google was faced with bankruptcy then the government would have little choice but to step in and nationalize the company.

And if that’s the case does the Cloud Computing industry need a healthy dose of government oversight in order to mitigate future risks to the taxpayer? If so, how would that look?

I’d really like to hear your thoughts. Over to you…