Back when the first settlers came to America, guns were power. It wasn’t an intimate knowledge of the surrounding area that allowed English, Spanish and French settlers to massacre the indigenous Indians and create the land we know today. It was big freaking guns. That has changed. Now, guns are not power, they have abdicated the title to knowledge. In a world where any one of a number of countries has the firepower to end the world as we know it, wars are no longer being determined by the megatonnage of a nation’s arsenal. Beginning in the 20th century what you know has become more important than what you can blow up. In the 21st, the Internet has become the new bomb. And with a seemingly endless supply of knowledge, Google, it appears, is on its way to becoming the new God.

It seemed silly enough when people started listing “Google” as their religious view on Facebook. Now, it seems almost scary. Google is omnipresent, having interests in data, energy, communication and almost everything else. Google, being an intangible concept (corporation) rather than a physical being, is nearly omnipotent. The only thing that Google lacks is the omniscience, which it might be getting ready to fix.

As students at the University of Illinois, we should all have some experience with NetFiles, the online data-storage center that allows you to store a chunk of data on University-owned servers. Amazon.com, Facebook and many others also offer services like this. Some for free, others charging a subscription fee. Recent news reports state that Google is getting ready to launch Gdrive, a remote data-storage service similar to WebFiles and the others. It seems a little peculiar because there is already a lot of competition which caps profitability. Why would Google even be interested? And this is where the suspicion begins.

It may be hard to remember back that far, but in the ’90s, Google got its start as the go-to guy for search. The guys who started Google spent a summer programming a search engine that beats, in my opinion, all of the others in its ability to find Web sites that contain data that most closely match your idea of the data you want to find. In other words, you would ask for it, Google would deliver it.

Since its creation, Google’s engine has been given tune-ups and upgrades by some of the smartest computer minds in the world. It has become the Uber-Engine. The only data that Google could not find were that which were not on the Internet. Only the files stored on your personal hard drive were exempt from the Google spiders. If Google launches its Gdrive, and people begin to store their data remotely on Google-owned servers, what is to keep Google from looking through your data with its spiders?

Surely Google is not interested in your free-form poetry, your vacation photos, or your latest attempt at erotica. But big markets that remote storage companies try to appeal to are University and corporations. Researchers for either might put their data on this convenient remote storage device, effectively handing their secret research to Google for safe keeping. If Google has physical possession of secret bits, and the world’s best algorithm for sifting through data, there is nothing keeping Google from profiting in knowledge from Gdrive. Of course, the same goes for every other remote storage site.

While Google’s intentions are most likely innocuous, there is always a chance that it might have an agenda behind its Gdrive effort. Soon, Google is going to bid on the sweet 700mHz bandwidth, the most premium of bandwidths. If it wins, and maybe if it doesn’t, it is going to work to release a Google phone. If Google takes advantage of the wealth of information it will be shepherding, than it looks like this phone will be the new Jesus; the offspring of and direct connection to the almighty.