Web2 giant Google is pacing up its efforts to dominate the next generation of internet, Web3. Richard Widmann who joined Google as a legal counsel and is currently the head of strategy for Google Cloud gave an interview to a crypto news publishing house at the Mainnet conference in NewYork, where he reiterated the desire of the trillion-dollar company to adapt itself to the changing landscape of the internet.
He indicated in the interview that Google shares the decentralized and open-source development principles of the cryptocurrency community. According to him, Google is evaluating the possibility of creating a “bridge” between Web3 businesses and blockchain by providing them with the necessary Node services via Google cloud.
Nodes are essentially desktop or laptop computers that sync with one another to maintain the crypto network. The role of a blockchain node is to serve as a communication hub that can execute various tasks. In the sense that they interact with one another in some way, any computer or device that links to the Bitcoin network, for instance, may be referred to as a node. These nodes can use the peer-to-peer Bitcoin protocol to send data about transactions and blocks throughout the dispersed network of computers. There are various types of Bitcoin nodes, however, they are all classified in accordance with their unique functions.
Furthermore, the goal of decentralized technology is defeated if tech giants like Amazon or Google control the majority of blockchain nodes. Decentralization, however, is a grey area. Although Widmann believes that Google’s Web3 approach must emphasize decentralization, not everything can or should be as decentralized as possible.
“If everything is running on Google, I will be the first to say that is a problem, frankly,” said Widmann.
He believed that there would be coordination problems even if one put in the effort and amassed a sizable sum of money to set up a data centre with DAO participants. Widmann was very clear that everything should not ultimately be on blockchain and that decentralization isn’t always practical.
“There are some things where a censorship-resistant, distributed source of truth makes sense….there are [also] a lot of things that don’t require immutable ledgers.”
He adds that Google Cloud is chain-agnostic and that layer one protocols will be allowed to develop on top of it, compete with one another, or fill distinct market segments.
Widmann emphasized that Google is not in line with Avalanche’s vision. He said that Avalanche is layer-one because they “run on data centres, just like every other layer one,” while Google is layer-zero. All layer-one protocols are “running compute containers, generally on a cloud of some kind,” Widmann said.
He says that projects like Avalanche run ultimately on” top of a compute container hosted somewhere, and that’s where the cloud providers come in.”