Why Google makes the perfect ISP

There's always been a touch of Willy Wonka style unreality about Google Fiber.

Municipalities across the U.S. know that their broadband sucks, and they wrote proposals to Google in lieu of real action, hoping Google could solve their problems with their magic wand.

Google still has a "non-evil" and academic reputation in some quarters, although anybody who makes a living on the streets of the internet knows that Google is the most dangerous and rapacious company on the net. People think, for instance, that Google is a noble warrior against web spam, although Google sustains web spam by (i) being the only signficant source of traffic for many site types, and (ii) making it possible to monetize crappy content. In fact, Google has gained "question answering" capabilities in the last few years thanks to web spam farms run by companies like eHow.

What gets me is that, in a time where the world is overflowing with capital (signified by low interest rates and general low investment returns) both the private and public sectors in the U.S. seem completely indifferent to investments in infrastructure.

(And why should they? Telecom companies can make minimal investments in infrastructure and charge champagne prices for beer products.)

Google steps in because, like Microsoft, they've got a small number of wildly profitable products and an inability to use the profits from those products to create new products of comparable profitability.

This is good for Kansas City, but it's one of just a long list of distractions, such as snake oil fixed wireless schemes for rural access, that have stood in the way of a real national plan for broadband U.S.

> It gets better: For people that don’t need a super-fast connection, Google is offering a 5Mbps connection for free — yes, free. If Google Fiber expands, there’s no guarantee that this will remain the case, but it could totally upset the market for entry-level broadband. Even the “catch” isn’t that much of a catch. Google is planning on charging a one-time $300 fee to run the fiber to each residence, but if you opt for a contract, the fee is waived. Free accounts will have to pay the installation fee, unfortunately.

Free for 7 years. I'm not saying that's bad, but it's still relevant.

Are you a lawyer?

Antitrust law is complicated. Simply subsidizing or undercutting competitors isn't nearly enough; nor is having a monopoly. For example, it wasn't Microsoft's monopoly that got them in trouble, it's that it leveraged its monopoly on Windows to force a monopoly of the browser (special APIs and restrictive license agreements with OEMs)...not to mention the whole Java thing.

Anyways, if someone came out with free energy or free telephones, I doubt anyone would complain. These are utilities. The internet is the same. Last year the UN even declared that the internet is a fundamental basic human right

Whether they succeed or not with Fiber, whether it expands to every American city or not and whether they get sued because of antitrust laws (which I don't believe they will), the fact is that they're changing the status quo. Even only scaring the telecom companies enough for them to offer decent plans is a win for Google AND for the customer.

Sure Google pursues its own commercial goals but in the end it benefits the customer as well. I personally think they will succeed, will sign up as soon as it's available in my city and believe what they're doing is great for the future of the 'net.

The biggest selling point here (in Canada) would probably not even be the speed (about 40 times faster than whatever else we can get) but the unlimited bandwidth. As opposed to the USA (I think) we have very aggressive bandwidth caps up here. Try consuming anything with a 30Gb/month limit, especially when your ISP charges a few cents per subsequent Mb without telling you until you get your bill. You'd be welcoming an alternative like Fiber as well.

> If you are someone like Vimeo, Hulu, Netflix etc then you would forever be at a disadvantage to Youtube due to bandwidth costs.

No, you are not, because Google happily peers with (almost) everyone. So long as you can get the traffic to one of the 130+ places where google has set up shop, and from there, the traffic is free.

This is much, much better than what Comcast & friends are trying to do, by billing traffic twice (once from the consumers, once from the service providers).

http://www.peeringdb.com/view.php?asn=15169