In our school environment, we had a couple issues with Google Earth's default behaviors - here are my workarounds.

First off we have a student web proxy that works based on a whitelist concept. So we have to allow any web traffic explicitly. With the help of little snitch and one incomplete help page from google, here is what I've added to our global whitelist and seems to be allowing all the features:

* kh.google.com

* www.keyhole.com

* mw2.google.com

* earth.google.com

* auth.keyhole.com

* maps.google.com

* khmdb.google.com

It also want access to www.google.com - but we don't allow students to full google access - but Google Earth still seems to run fine.

The next annoyance was Google's softwareupdate which wants to run for all users and update Google Earth on launch.

Adding the following to our loginhook fixed that:

mkdir -P $nethomedir/Library/Google/

touch $nethomedir/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate

chown root $nethomedir/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate

chmod 644 $nethomedir/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate

the $nethomedir var is fetched from dscl earlier in the script

Students need to have stored the proxy password in their keychain - but most have already done that when visiting a web page earlier. They then just need to allow Google Earth to access their keychain.