In the past year Google has made a lot of news regarding its buying-up of so-called "dark fiber," i.e. unused fiber optic networks. This has given the conspiracy-minded lots to mull over, but Google's head of special initiatives Chris Sacca
says there's nothing to get paranoid about. In an interview with Light Reading, Sacca takes great pains to dispel the world-domination myth, saying that Google is buying up dark fiber for two reasons and two reasons only: to connect its server farms and to "peer" with telecom providers like AT&T. Google's definition of "peering" seems to be "buying capacity on metro or access networks," rather than the more conventional mutual sharing of capacity (since Google's doesn't have any capacity of its own to share with the likes of AT&T). Sacca insists that "there's nothing mysterious about buying dark fiber," and seems a little hurt that when AT&T does it their stock goes up, but when Google does it people speculate that "'Google is trying to take over the world.'"
Tags: chris sacca, ChrisSacca, conspiracy, dark fiber, DarkFiber, google, light reading, LightReading
