The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Google was close to finally launching a long-rumored cloud-based storage service.

While details are sketchy and this is still very much in the rumor stage, the article suggested the service would be free for consumers and small businesses up to a certain level of storage at which point, they would charge a fee. How this is going to break down, however, isn't clear yet.

Still, it led eWeek to write an article titled "Google Cloud Storage Threatens Dropbox, Box." I'm not sure it threatens Box though quite as much as Dropbox, a consumer oriented service, but any time a big company like Google enters a space (or threatens to at least), it is likely to have some impact. .

This free-pay model would be similar to the way Dropbox and Box.net work today. Both offer free online storage for individuals with different pricing structures for business users (or others) who might have greater storage requirements.

Box.net gives you 5 GB of free storage for its free account. The free version of Dropbox provides 2 GB.

But Box.net has enterprise-level services and offers much more than a pure storage option including the ability to collaborate and share along with some enterprise-level security features and integration across a variety of mobile devices.

Google has the advantage of having collaboration and sharing built into Google Docs, but it's not clear yet how this new storage service would integrate across other services, although presumably it would.

It's worth noting that you can upload content to Google Docs now, although I just checked my personal account and it only allows a minuscule 10 MB or storage space, although you can upgrade to 20 GB for just $5 per year (and up from there). 

For more information:
- see the Wall Street Journal article
- see the eWeek article