Those of you who've read this blog before will recall the Saturday night out and talking about fragmentation of audience and channels with friends. During the same evening, I was airing my knowledge of Google's current policy of building new server farms near dams in the States in order to be closer to sources of power (probably no one was listening having had enough of the previous conversation!)...
In any case, in this age of virtual abundance, my point was that access was not free but dependent on Google et al footing a huge energy bill for cooling all those processors, and that eventually these cost would have to met from somewhere, or that the exponential growth in web use would result in a power bottleneck.
Well (for once), I was right! This post from Nick Carr puts it more elegantly but sets out the same points. If you follow the links you'll see that he was talking about this far earlier than me too! The point is that unless sufficient investment is put into the Grid the huge internet drain will break it. This is unfortunately an open ended investment, with over 1 billion users and growing, it would be like bailing out the Titanic with a bucket.
How do weigh up the relative rights of the population to use the web with the demands of a hospital to run life support machines or stores to keep food refrigerated? This is obviously a contrived argument and not yet imminent but does beg a question: How does a virtual economy and the new business models that the internet has created, become reconciled with the old bricks and mortar and utility economic model?
Or to put it another way, how often would you Google if it cost you 50p a time? Something we all need to think about.