*"Too big to fail."
http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2010/02/the-day-that-google-died/
(...)
Currently the vast majority of “humanity’s data” lies in the hands of individual corporations.
Companies like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Apple, IBM, and Microsoft have staked their future on the value of the information being collected and archived in their datacenters. They have created the systems for collecting it, and have invested heavily in vast server farms for storing it.
However, if one of these corporations ceases to exist, what happens to all of the information currently residing on the servers?
Thinking long-term, and knowing that only a very small percentage of companies survive long enough to celebrate their 50th anniversary, let alone their 100th or 200th, how much of this information will still exist 200 years from now?
What will our great, great, great grandchildren know about us? Will they even know we existed?
It’s easy to make the argument that information created “by the people, for the people,” should be preserved through some form of public ownership.
But that doesn’t make sense in our current state of the world.
No global entity currently exists with the credibility and resources to take on this kind of task...
