• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, April 1, 2005

Today, one week after Yahoo! said it would increase the storage capacity on free e-mail accounts to one gigabyte, Google came out with a plan to double the amount of storage it offered to two gigabytes, from one.

Google's move to pull ahead of Yahoo! is reminiscent of its grandstanding last year, when MSN launched a search engine in beta that included five billion pages in its index. The same day that news broke of the MSN launch, Google's home page reflected an increase in index size from around four billion to more than eight billion.

Google's one-upmanship isn't necessarily in users' best interests. Some search observers expressed doubt last year that the extra pages in the index would be of use to searchers; similarly, it's doubtful people need, or want to store two gigabytes worth of e-mails -- enough for thousands upon thousands of messages.

The showboating might give Google bragging rights, but it's also a distraction from the real issue facing the company: its business model for Gmail might not withstand scrutiny from privacy advocates. Google's model involves serving contextual ads to Gmail users based on the content of e-mail messages. As the company recently acknowledged in a report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, such a strategy faces potential challenges: "There is a risk that state legislatures will attempt to regulate the automated scanning of e-mail messages in ways that interfere with our Gmail free advertising-supported Web mail service."

Instead of engaging in gamesmanship with its rivals, Google should come up with a business plan that doesn't rely on scanning users' e-mails.