Hacker News Reader

Comment by DougN7 | Hacker News Reader

Given that they are apparently getting out of the ISP business because of the startup costs involved, I'm wondering how they'll do getting into the car business, which must have even higher startup costs.

View on HN

My theory is that they are getting out off Fiber / ISP business not because of costs, but rather the goal of Google Fiber has been met. Back in 2012 there was a real risk posed by ISPs, however with effective lobbying ensured Net-Neutrality becoming adopted as an official policy, and with next president likely being from the same party. There is no longer need for Google Fiber as it was in 2012. Also maybe there is another technology thats more lucrative which is on horizon and thus Google is recusing itself from making likely to fall investments in optical fiber network.

I don't agree with this at all. Google's projects don't always make money, but I don't think it ever does something without an intention to make money. The idea that Google Fiber existed solely to further a political cause seems far-fetched to me.

Also, net neutrality being in the Democratic Party platform is a far cry from it actually being law. The election isn't over yet and so we don't know who the next president will be and which parties will control which houses of Congress.

It was to further a political cause that allows them to continue to make money. In the end, it was still about the money.

It also made other ISPs start deploying ~gigabit/s service, which was another stated goal, no?

And for internet companies, users' access to the internet is a complementary product: the more and faster, the better.

Google has done this before e.g. they adopted a brilliant strategy, and drove up the auction prices in a spectrum option forcing FCC to adopt open rules. By threatening to build out a Fiber optic network, it forced the competition to respond.

https://www.cnet.com/news/spectrum-auction-google-wins-by-lo...

They aren't getting out of the ISP business; the article notes they are not expanding Fiber to new cities but are pursuing other avenues for providing broadband access.

Exactly. I mean, they provide internet access with balloons now: https://www.solveforx.com/loon/

> now

Project Loon started in 2011 (officially announced in 2013).

They're not getting out of the ISP business. Sure, it's been slowed down, but what did you expect to happen when national ISP's are slowing the deployments to a crawl by suing their local governments to try and block Google?

I'd assumed that they were going to license the technology to partners and that their current efforts were to create the reference implementation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com