With playful speculation bubbling around Google's next moves (Goobuntu or Napster etc.) I thought I might add some ludicrous suggestions of my own.

Google is one of the most powerful supercomputing platforms in the world. Tor is a distributed network that anonymizes web browsing and any other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor's security is improved as it grows and as more organisations volunteer the time and bandwidth to run servers. Google has alot of bandwidth and servers. (The Googlesphere, as presented in the company's public announcements, comrises more than 100,000 servers ranging from 533 MHz Intel Celeron to dual 1.4 GHz Intel Pentium III - that's 126–316 teraflops, one third the speed of the Blue Gene supercomputer, the most powerful unclassified computing machine available to humanity. There's a significant difference between Google and Bluegene - Google is interwoven with the internet. Physical infrastructure - Google's four U.S.-based datacentres - two in Silicon Valley and two in Virginia - each with an OC 48 (2488 Mbit/s) internet connection. Data - a constantly updated fascimile of the internet itself).

Suppose Google were to install Tor's Onion Routers throughout its serverfarms. Global internet users communications would bounce around anonymously in a massive distributed network of virtual tunnels. It would be unprecendented in scale, a network that would open up the internet to people in censored regimes all around the world. It would enable a generation of software developers to create new communication tools with privacy built-in. The Google platform running onion routers would provide an ecosystem for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their identity. By donating - say, 20kb/s of bandwidth per server(!) - Google would be in a position to - inadvertently - overwhelm, the 'Great Firewall' - a striking way to differentiate itself from competitors - particularly those invited to testify in congress todayand in two weeks time: Cisco Systems, (Google), Microsoft, Yahoo.

. . . I doubt Google can even afford to have people sitting around thinking about providing a free privacy service to the planet. For a (not-so-)small - but vocal - proportion of its users? Perhaps, - or is it that Google's business model is now inextricably linked into a downward spiral of content/user aware advertising and anti-democratic emerging markets - increasingly at the expense of its more mature markets?