Google in Kansas City: A Tale of Two-Speed America
ft.com
ft.com
Google is rolling out fiber to neuter Comcast. Period.
Comcast basically blackmailed Google several years back and thought they won. Google, rightfully, now saw Comcast as an existential threat to their business.
Google will keep rolling out until they have Comcast by the balls. Only then will they stop.
All of their products are designed to give them different kinds of data, and being the man-in-the-middle to the entire internet on a per-household basis gives Google an incredibly fine-grained picture of the patter-of-life of the people that use their ISP service.
Being able to steal Comcast's market is just a nice side benefit.
See also Google Fiber's privacy policy:
Other information from the use of Google Fiber Internet (such as URLs of websites visited or content of communications) will not be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, except with your consent or to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh
A variety of ISP's (Comcast, MTNL, IDEA) also run MITM attacks and inject ads in pages, sometimes on behalf of law enforcement. I imagine they inject tracking as well.
https://blog.ryankearney.com/2013/01/comcast-caught-intercep...
https://medium.com/@sushubh/delhi-police-is-literally-doing-...
Google could either do these things or block others from doing them.
Honestly even if you take that as meaning they won't ever track history of internet access to a google account, why would you assume they need to do that, just to have more information on you?
It's not like you escape their privacy invating antics if you just use google search (or a site with google ads) without an account.
They get some of this already when people choose to hand Google their DNS traffic, but being the ISP makes this complete. You may want to also watch Aral Balkan's talk posted just above DJB's at the same URL; he does a better job than I can at describing how Google (and Facebook, etc) are using surveillance-as-a-business-model.
> Google Fiber's privacy policy
The risk of a national security letter (which the part you quoted includes as an exception) is already enough of a reason to limit how much personal data is in a single database, that's not the main problem. That policy isn't a binding contract. Do you really think it won't be changed the moment someone at Google decides it would be profitable?
They promised "Nest" data would stay separate, too, which quickly changed to sharing "limited" data. Sorry, but promises not to snoop don't mean much when the promise contradicts their business model.
[1] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...
Your argument doesn't make sense, especially not with the rapid migration of traffic to SSL (and no, Google aren't MITM'ing SSL connections). The lifetime value of a single family's worth of ad-eyeballs simply isn't there to justify an undertaking of the size of Fiber.
Yes, they are ultimately an ad-company, but that doesn't mean that there is always a single-hop connection between any Google activity and ad revenue. If there's an ad angle here, it's in enabling end users to consume much larger quantities of ad-supported content.
When 95% of your revenue comes from ad sales, you're an ad company.
Perhaps it makes more sense that Google is investing in high-cost infrastructure because they want to move away from the ad-model business. It's risky to have 95% of your revenue coming from a single industry.
Google can eat a lot of the costs of setting up a better network, which is a great investment in the future if you're betting that a majority of people will need high speed internet access 10-20 years from now. Then they can start extracting monopoly profits just as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast etc. do now.
Google has many skills, but last-mile delivery networks aren't one of them. Not that they can't be, but it's just not that profitable of a business to waste their time on. The business itself is just a math problem balancing quality of service with investment -- and not a particularly difficult one.
Fortunately, that's not their play here: Google has invested far too little money in Fiber to be truly serious about it as a business. Fiber is just their way of generating consumer demand for higher speed pipes by saying "hey, look at this! this is how it should be!" They did the same thing on Android with the Nexus phones, so it's not even a new tactic for them.
> Google can eat a lot of the costs of setting up a better network, which is a great investment in the future if you're betting that a majority of people will need high speed internet access 10-20 years from now.
The problem is that you can't just build the network and be done with it. It costs a lot of money to maintain and provide service (approx. 10% of the original cost of the network per year), and that's money that Google will want to spend on other, more profitable things. Hell, if they want to get into infrastructure, the smart play would be free wireless Internet for the developing world (i.e. what Facebook is doing).
But again, Google hasn't spent anywhere near the amount of money on Fiber that they would need to in order to make it a commercially successful business. Because that's not the point: they're using cities like Kansas City and Austin to showroom their vision of what the Internet should be.
Google will never expand Fiber to the entire country, and I'd be surprised if they don't sell the infrastructure to another company in 5-10 years once they've achieved their goals. If the ISPs are providing better service, customers can upload more personal / sensor data to the cloud for Google to mine, and Google can cram more ad-laden services down the pipes. It's a win/win for them.
This whole endeavor is about Google flexing its muscles as a media power player to ensure their content/ads aren't held for ransom by any ISPs. Any company can try to build a national fiber network; but it takes Google (and their army of media contacts thanks to Google News) to talk this much about what amounts to a minuscule infrastructure investment (~$150 million over 5 years - or about what Comcast spends on infrastructure in a week).
If Google wanted to come at Comcast, they'd be gearing up a lot faster than they are. At this point Google Fiber is mostly FttPR-Fiber to the Press Release. And also, I don't think any of the first several Google Fiber locations were even in Comcast territory. So far AT&T and TWC have been their competitors.
They want to create demand because Google loves remote computing and loves internet consumption.
Google is providing a model for the ISPs by forcing local communities to deregulate their ISP franchising system. Before Google Fiber, each town or state would take a pound of flesh from the new company trying to lay down a network. Google made the cities bend over backwards.
https://gigaom.com/2010/02/10/google-doesnt-want-to-be-an-is...
Our cap was 50 Mbit which wasn't bad, but then when Google came in, Comcast upped that plan to 250 Mbit with no hardware upgrades or anything for the same price which was really nice.
The main thing I noticed though is that reliability with Google is a lot higher. My Comcast connection would go down for an hour or two about once a week, but my fiber connection seems to always be fine.
As far as cities bending over backwards, Provo definitely did that. We had put in a citywide fiber network using a $40 million bond and then ended up selling it to Google for $1. It was definitely the best move considering the company that had been operating it before defaulted on their payments, but Provo will still be paying for the network for 12 years.
"Even now, the schools in Kansas City, Missouri, are effectively segregated, with almost all white children at private schools. Just nine per cent of pupils in the state system are white. Almost 90 per cent are on free lunches."
That statistic was totally shocking to me. Are there any other places in the U.S. where there's such a dramatic disparity in the race of students in public school relative to the overall population?
Although that isn't the exact same statistic. Basically in NY black kids go to school with black kids and white kids go to school with white kids, although there might be both a white public school and a black public school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_Public_Schools#Demog...
Here's another example. The City of St. Louis has a population of under 300K. The County of St. Louis has a population of over one million! And that does NOT include St. Louis city. It's both fair and unfair to not include St. Charles City in this (for reasons I won't go into) which includes another 300K. So most stats you read about St. Louis are based on 300K out of a total population of 1.6 million! And the city is the baddest part of town.
Not that I don't agree that there is disparity but, as someone else pointed out, it's by choice, not anything the government does. That's another story, a truth, that no one on HN wants to believe and would downvote me into oblivion if I stated it.
Speaking more specifically, compare Normandy to Ladue. St. Louis County isn't just a mirror of its city -- if anything, it's a magnification of its city. This American Life did an excellent story that discusses this ( http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t... ):
* nearly 1/2 of black students in the St. Louis region (not the city -- the entire region, those 1.5m people) attended unaccreddited or provisionally accredited schools.
* Tellingly, the first wave of desegregation in St. Louis included County schools because, according to the judge, the county suburbs shared equal blame for the segregation of city schools.
Anyways, that's all moot when the social and economic problems the region faces are clearly present in the county as well as the city.
In case you don't understand, the city is not part of any county but has both a chief of police and a sheriff. There are personnel that handle duties that cities don't typically have but do exist for county governments. The county is not part of the city and has no relationship with them whatsoever (this has changed slightly over the last decade or so but essentially still true).
I just realized I can get into a too long a list of the differences but there are articles online and, I think, a Wikipedia article.
But a lot of other cities with a comparable population split, so St. Louis's situation isn't as special as its county's residents like to proclaim.
> In case you don't understand
Having spent several decades in St. Louis, I understand and disagree with this piece of regional folk knowledge:
1. The trivia that creates the population split in reporting is rather exceptional (and a nice testament to the dismal state of Missouri politics for the past N decades), but the occurance of city/county population splits on the order of 100,000's to millions is not nearly exceptional as people claim. St. Louis City really has been an exceptionally bad city for a while now.
2. This folk knowledge is usually used as an excuse to ignore the fact that the county is as segregated into rich/white and poor/black as the city is. I suppose I don't have to remind you that Normandy is in the County. The St. Louis that's been in the news for the past year absolutely 100% IS the County everyone pretends is so drastically different from the city.
3. This factoid also ignores the fact that White Flight defines the political geography of the St. Louis region (go to Main Street some time -- you won't have a hard time finding people proudly proclaiming that's why they live there, and after a few beers the language isn't even very coded; it's always funny to hear an apartement dweller cite home values as a reason for living in St. Charles...).
If this factoid were used with any degree of historical honesty or presence of mind toward improving the region, then it would be a harsh indict of the region and a call to reflection, rather than essentially an excuse for complacency.
In short, this factoid captures everything that I hated about St. Louis (and there was a lot I loved about it).
> The county is not part of the city and has no relationship with them whatsoever... but essentially still true
The city and county are tied together in a lot of ways that matter -- public transit funding, funding for major public parks in the city, regional city planning, etc.
I think for the past couple of decades at least, the degree of political inter-connection between the suburbs and the city rivals that of similar cities, even in spite of the weird political arrangement.
More to the point, we're quibbling over a detail that is irrelevant to the fundamental truth of the original post in the subthread -- St. Louis County school districts are strikingly and exceptionally segregated. There are only a few high schools in the entire region that have anything resembling a representative mix of the demographics found throughout the region.
That you insist on thinking "a lot of other cities with a comparable population split" is the same thing shows you do not understand the geopolitics or the makeup of the region.
I do agree on the point that it is a choice for those exiting for private schools, or exercising their economically-empowered physical mobility. But to say that those students attending St. Louis Public Schools all choose their school is ludicrous. They are assigned a school, and many cannot afford to move into an area with a better school or attend a private school.
So the choice is one-sided.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...
I'm from the UK and was genuinely shocked. While there are disparities and issues over here, they're on a different scale compared to the US.
Then I suggest you start catching up by reading this article, which does a very good job of explaining how racism and segregation didn't just end with the Civil Rights movement, even though that has been a popular myth among people with privilege (often not intentionally, which is yet another reason to always check your assumptions).
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...
[if you only read one of my links, read this one]
> Are there any other places in the U.S.
Yes, many of the larger cities have grown even more segregated over time thanks to redlining.
http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/03/24/10-of-the-most-segreg...
> public school
Public school has always been the battleground for racial issues. After Brown v Board of Education, VA (and other states) circumvented the integration orders in what is known as the Massive Resistance[1]. This was the purpose behind the modern idea of "school vouchers": to get around an order to integrate public schools, vouchers were issued to give white people the "freedom of choice" to send their kids to a private school (aka "segregation academies"[2]), while minorities had to attend the (often deliberately underfunded) public school. We still see these ideas today, just with more obfuscation. The damage done to the public school system is going to take a long time to fix.
KCMO school district, maybe, but (perhaps surprisingly) there are large parts of the city that have Kansas City addresses but don't fall in the KCMO school district.
To be clear, though, the broader point about schools being effective segregated is true, and the KCMO school district is awful.
There appears to be some confusion of KCMO the school district with KCMO the city (let alone the metro area).
I noted that elsewhere, and got down voted for it for some reason. There's segregation, yes, but it doesn't work quite the way that's implied, even if we only consider the city proper—I highly doubt a majority of white people in KCMO are sending their kids to private schools. In the KCMO school district, OK, that could be. Maybe I came off as defending the situation, despite calling out that there is indeed segregation? Who knows.
This statistic only relates to the rather small Kansas City Missouri public school district which only contains an estimated 17,500 students.
The author is misleading readers to believe that this statistic relates to all the schools in a relatively large US City named "Kansas City."
Per wikipedia:
In fact, there are portions of Kansas City, Missouri, where children attend 14 other "suburban" districts. In other words, the Kansas City District comprises the oldest parts of the city and is not contiguous with the boundaries of the city of Kansas City, Missouri.
So if we look up the total demographic of students that live in that same small geographic footprint I'd wager to say its not much higher than 9% white. (although that information is proving much more difficult to find)
As bachmeier comments - there is much more to the story.
(To see this, look at the number of black people in Kansas City, Missouri, who live within the boundaries of the Hickman Mills, Center, Grandview, Raytown, and Independence school districts.)
If that's true, then the Kansas City Public School District really is very segregated, even considering only the very narrow context of the population living within the district's boundaries. How it got that way is well documented; it is less well recognized that a major reason the district remains so segregated is that the black political establishment has adamantly opposed every recent effort to make the district more attractive to its white residents, many of whom are wealthy enough to pursue better options. One current example is Académie Lafayette's stymied effort to establish a high school in partnership with the district.
That guesstimate looks high, based on what I could find of the boundaries of the district and the racial data from this map: http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/
Total population: 192,692
Race:
White only: 87,765 (46%)
Black only: 80,627 (41%)
Missouri has a particularly bad problem. Basically, there is a lot of evidence that desegregation works in improving education outcomes. Yet, the issue is looked at with suspicion, since richer people in good school districts believe it is bad for them. The podcast features a shocking town hall meeting where you can hear the worst of people's racial prejudices. They looked at Ferguson, MO in particular, and how kids got bused to a predominantly-white suburban 'good' school district and the ensuing political drama viewed from the real implications on people's lives.
Based on the median household income in Romania being 16% that of the US, if 1gbps Internet access there costs $35-$40, you're paying the US equivalent of $210-$240.
If Romania's capital costs were $35-$40, and Google's are $100, the Romania cost is high by a significant margin if you adjust for the economies being so different.
Edit: the speed itself is also not limited to just inside the country, although ISPs in Europe use public peerings a lot more than those in the US.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/4647615600.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/4647608031.png
But this Congressman couldn't find the funds to subsidize the poor people's signup fees, which are just $10 each?
Is there a study that shows that the low income population makes better use of high speed bandwidth? Right now it's mainly just a luxury product for HD video streams and the majority of the educational gains of an Internet connection can be had with 5-10mbps.
- The workers use up too many parking spaces.
- They're richer than us.
- They think we're poor.
- They commute to work instead of living in the office.
- They're untrustworthy because they're outsiders.
Her neighborhood will have a slightly lower standard of living than her clone because the residents have no where to park, are not a cultural fit with the neighborhood, their voting patterns and motivations are not the same as their neighbors or are otherwise screwing up carefully gerrymandered districts (WRT funding local schools or police, for example).
Also there are likely zoning issues based on old laws, for example maybe the zoning laws somehow prohibit my long dead great grandfather from running a small accounting practice or a yoga studio next door by banning retail traffic, but somehow they're skirting the zoning laws by sneakily not allowing retail traffic or visitors or some other cheaty hack of the local zoning laws. This will also make her life a living hell when the zoning laws are inevitably changed to permit the outsiders and suddenly neighbor X is screaming because neighbor Y used the new loosened rules to sneak in an autobody repair business and is legally running a weld grinder at 2am every night and neighbor Z is dumping waste from his home electroplating business in his backyard.
Now she can't go out in public and start whining that she doesn't want to do work and take risks in exchange for the same salary she got for doing basically nothing, like in the past. And she can't whine in public about how they screwed up the perfectly gerrymandered districts. And she can't whine in public about cultural fit because we tolerate, even encourage, that in business but in public thats just old fashioned racism, whatever-ism, etc, and that doesn't fly in public. But she can go in public and rant about how "they hate us because we cling to our God and our guns" and "they hate us because they're rich" or whatever. So she's a bundle of hate and anger but all she can say in public about it is babble.
So from an empathy standpoint, whats in it for her? Oh nothing? But there is a huge potential downside? Well there you go.
They have parking problems: consider 4 small businesses in a 2000 sq ft house: that'll be 8 or 10 cars parked around the house, rather more than the property is designed for. I'd imagine traffic during commuting hours would be interesting, too, given that residential neighborhoods are usually laid out to prevent it.
The start-ups and the pseudo-commercial property owner are primarily interested in keeping costs low, rather than keeping the neighborhood viable. Residents can no longer expect infrastructure upgrades (other than street maintenance) if the commuters are in the same voting area. Even if they aren't, you can probably expect the tax base to go down since they probably will go back to their own neighborhoods to use other facilities.
- These houses are residential properties.
- People are using them as commercial properties (offices, under the guise of 'live/work spaces')
- No one is stopping it, Zoning is not enforced there (because 'it's a poor neighborhood'), but zoning is enforced in wealthier areas (Johnson County).
The rest of the stuff you mention is true too. But I don't think it's the "entirety of her case" -- it's support for the case. "They commute to work instead of living in the office", for instance, is strong evidence that the property is commercial, not residential in nature.
This seems like a cut-and-dry zoning violation, that's being ignored because the area is "poor". I don't think she's being destructive, she's just asking for fair and equal treatment.
Seriously pondering moving out of Canada and back to the US and I'm not interested at all in paying for a place like Boston where I used to live.
Not all of these are listed on sites like Craigslist, so it helps to reach out to some property management places.