The New York times is reporting that Google has filed a patent for floating data centers, ostensibly in order to bring the centers closer to certain geographic areas where it is not reasonable or cost effective to build them on land. I don’t know about you, but that seems to be a pretty niche market if you ask me.  Could it be there is another (possibly equally far-fetched) reason for wanting to do such a thing?

The first thing that sprung to my mind when reading this was the Principality of Sealand -what amounts to an oil-rig style platform situated in international waters which, some time ago declared that it was a sovereign nation. The upshot of this little move is that the data center housed on the ocean platform isn’t bound by the laws of any particular nation (Other than Sealand itself of course). It’s easy to extrapolate here and see how operating a datacenter in international waters could open up some autonomy for Google.  Now, despite the apparent contradiction with the whole “don’t be evil” bit, I’m sure there are a number of legalities that make this a stretch.  On the other hand, there are cases where that autonomy could be a very good thing. The fact is that large companies routinely patent pie-in-the-sky solutions and rarely actually cash in on them but one way or the other, it’s an interesting idea.