Google: the world's most dangerous media company?

Google takes its mission statement (to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful) very seriously. What makes Google cool is the fact that it sees business potential in areas that are generally considered unworthy of any investment, and opens up a whole new world of information for people at large. When Yahoo! was manually indexing pages and creating portals, Google came up with its algorithms that made the internet the useful tool it is today. When web-mail became a tired old thing, Google reinvented it with Gmail. (People associate it with its storage space, but I see it as a web application that pushes the limits of scripting and CSS).

Now Google has decided to bring more information to the table by digitizing the greatest libraries in the world. To be fair, Amazon started the process by digitizing a large part of its catalog with the publishers' consent, but Google is pushing the envelope here by going straight to the libraries and digitizing content that is in the public domain. (read copyright-expired stuff). Which makes it possible for people to have access to content that

a. they are unaware of
b. is not available for sale and
c. is not available in most libraries.

This latest move prompted Red Herring to make the (fond?) statement "It’s official. Google is the most dangerous media company on the planet...Google bounces in a new direction every time its competitors seem on the verge of catching up." It's hard not to agree.. and I'm loving it!