Google's looming patent hammer in the cloud
According to SYS-CON, Google's cloud computing patent portfolio, and specifically its patent application for "Encoding and Adaptive, Scalable Accessing of Distributed Models", gives it a "multi-year lead in cloud computing." Could it also give it a club to pummel would-be competitors?
As SYS-CON's Stephen Arnold suggests:
Google can, with the deployment of software, deliver global services that other companies cannot match in terms of speed of deployment, operation, and enhancement...(T)his patent document is an indication that Google can put its foot on the gas pedal at any time and operate in a dimension that other companies cannot.
This is great for Google, and is exactly how competition should work: on the strength of customer value and vendor agility.
However, what Arnold doesn't cover, but which is potentially more momentous in the patent filing, is how Google plans to use its cloud patents against competitors. Some cloud-related Google patents, like the one for a floating data center, are probably not going to inhibit innovation by others. But this one just might, as it goes to the heart of wringing performance out of the cloud.
Google has been a fairly benevolent steward of its intellectual property thus far, and let's hope that continues. But if Google has the opportunity to squash Microsoft's cloud efforts even as Microsoft seeks to head off threats from Google's forays into "desktop" applications, I'm not sure I'd be betting on benevolence.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
1. Competing providers develop a system which would infringe the US patent, but limit access to customers outside the US. US consumers have to make do with whatever google chooses to allow them access to, while peering at the fun the rest of the world is having.
2. Competing providers just do whatever they want, comfortably ignoring the patent, but siting the servers outside the US, on the basis that the patent restricts only what happens on the servers, and therefore so long as the servers are offshore, google can't touch them.
Logically, option (2) would seem more likely, but there have been some worrying developments in the U.S. attitude to enforcement of domestic issues worldwide (Antiguan gaming, for example). There have also been cases in the UK where the courts have determined that a UK patent is infringed even where the servers implementing the invention are offshore, if they are accessed in the UK. (Menashe v. William Hill).
It's interesting to see how this might pan out. The vast disparity between the number of software patents granted in the US vs. the rest of the world will have an impact on consumers which is more and more tangible as innovations increasingly become available only outside the US. In the same way that Mark Shuttleworth is right in saying that the success of Ubuntu depends on a compelling user experience, once US consumers realise that they can't join in the fun the rest of the world is having, there may be a groundswell of support to change the system.
The problem with this analysis arises when Google becomes prepared to grant licences, rather then use the patents to stifle competition. In that case, the perceived wealth of the US market makes it a compelling option for potential competitors to make their products available, albeit subject to payment of a google tax. In that case, any groundswell is likely to disappear.
As long as there is somewhere in the world where patents like this won't be granted, there's a possibility that this will be the catalyst to real change in the US patent system. The very nature of cloud computing raises some unique questions relating to territorial extent of patents, and provides a grand experiment to compare jurisdictions with different attitudes to software patenting.