Will Google Earth be the New Web Library for Imagery?

[update 1/9] Roger Hart at GeoCarta notes expansion of NOAA’s partnerships with commercial players, like it did with Google for Katrina imagery, in the coming year.

Here in Massachusetts we have this terrific free warehouse of MassGIS data hosted by MIT (on some cool open source software). So far as I know, the same data are available on Google Earth.  New, one foot data from Washington and Benton counties in Arkansas is now on the big Google Earth server. I wrote about how Microsoft was offering states the ability to host data on TerraServer back in September.

Guess what? It looks like Google may be the keeper of our public data. Gee isn’t it nice that all the GIS companies are providing KML out tools to comply with this vision? What happened to loosely coupled servers based on standards (The MIT server, CAST’s GeoStore and TerraServer all implement OGC standards, by the way and so far, Google Earth does not)? Wasn’t that how we were going to build a national map, an NSDI and a GSDI? Or maybe we’ve forgotten that vision? Or can we not follow through? I’ve suggested before that a private company may do better at NSDI tasks (heck ESRI already runs Geodata.gov) so why not Google for this role? Is that what we want?