I won't comment on any possible changes in the last couple years or why they may have happened, except to say that to the best of my knowledge, at no point was the sentiment, "We've shifted the industry enough that we can stop pretending to want to succeed."
Incumbents tried their hardest to prevent Google from hanging new wires. Many of the laws in-place today make it difficult for new companies to hang wires, which I believe was a reaction from the telegraph days[3].
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/att-admits-defea...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/why-att-says-it-...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/01/cable...
[3] https://io9.gizmodo.com/photos-from-the-days-when-thousands-...
Also, pointing to a couple of lawsuits ignores the fact that Google got huge concessions everywhere else. It got waivers from build-out requirements (obligations to cover whole cities, instead of "fiberhoods" with sufficient demand), fast-track permitting, free use of municipal land for fiber huts, etc: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-kansas-city-....
I think Google rightfully gets the benefit of goodwill that say AT&T does not. But it's a real triumph of narrative over facts to suggest that Google Fiber didn't have the red carpet rolled out for it in nearly every Fiber city.
(Incidentally, a team of four guys with heavy equipment have spent the last three hours trenching fiber 50 feet through my tiny yard. That's the second visit, and there will be one more, and that's not counting running the fiber down the main road which required months of permitting and surveying. I strongly suspect that's why Google pulled out of Fiber.)
Exactly -- AT&T thinks it's their infrastructure, but it's not. It's ours.
[1] The same is true for power lines. They're mostly privately owned. The power utilities are subject to various regulations (rate regulation, etc.) but the wires were built with private money and are private property. In contrast, most water/sewer lines are owned by the municipality, and paid for by the public through taxes and hook-up fees for new construction.
This is not and has not ever been true.
Here [1] is an open auction with ~$2 billion in federal aid attached - "a total of $1.98 billion for 10 years." This was last updated just over a week ago. I would dig further back for other subsidies, but it is not necessary. Through tax breaks and subsidies we (the government, tax payers, etc) have certainly aided infrastructure build out for telecom cos.
There was some tax dollar funded subsidies in the ARRA, but it's a vanishingly small fraction of the trillion+ dollars invested in telecom infrastructure in the last few decades.
Is this one of the taxes that they just throw straight onto my monthly bill?
Two, AT&T is paying the tax, but the government is mostly kicking the subsidies back to small rural telcos and coops. Telcos with more urban footprints, like AT&T, subsidize telcos in high cost rural areas.
So calling CAF a subsidy to AT&T really makes no sense. It’s like saying Apple would love the government to slap a 5% tax on iPhones and kick the money to providers of low cost phones. Even if Apple could increase prices to compensate, and get some of those subsidies for the iPhone SE, it’d still be worse off than without the “subsidy.”
The FCC doesn’t disclose USF contributions by company, but you can guess: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-303886A3.p.... Total reported telecom revenue is about $300 billion per year during that period. AT&T averaged $120 billion per year in revenue during that period (about 40% of the industry). (This is probably an overestimate because AT&T’s revenue includes non-telecom revenue.)
During that period, USF revenues were $7-8 billion per year. 40% of that is like $3 billion. Even if I’m wrong about AT&T’s revenue share by a factor of 4 AT&T still pays in much more than it gets out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain_in_the_United_S...
Also, it's likely eminent domain attempts for Google's benefit would run afoul of the law. I don't think the government can eminent domain something for the benefit of another corporation.
Do you live northwest of Austin, where 18 inches below the surface there is about two feet of solid limestone?
I'm all for having a set of processes and procedures in place, especially for an entity as large as ATT, but even by the standards of telecos their internal workings are a Franz Kafka nightmare.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a huge factor. Everyone likes to blame regulation for fibre failures, but the "last mile" of fiber to the premise, like many wired broadband technologies before it, is often a nightmare.
Reminds me of this story, where one Norwegian ISP started asking customers to dig their own trench: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/05/norwegian-isp-di...
^ entirely predictable
Google won't save us any more than Musk will. It's billionaires launching cars into space and fighting for personal wealth at the detriment of the rest of the society.
Can you help me understand the ire over that launch?
It's standard that new rockets are tested with a dummy payload to avoid destroying something valuable. Typically that's steel plates, but the Falcon Heavy was going to go up with a useless payload regardless. Saturn I-IV did the same, and V only had a payload because it was a module test and a launch test rolled into one.
I suppose the Tesla took up some extra man-hours fitting the car for launch, and the rocket wasn't aimed somewhere it would be destroyed (though I can't tell whether they usually are).
But seeing this spun as "SpaceX won't save us, they're just shooting cars into space!" is baffling to me; it was some personal wealth spent on adding spectacle to a totally normal rocket launch.
Now who would not want a new private American company to succeed in revitalizing the industry and increasing competition. Hmm, I can think of a few.
It used to be "NASA is a bloated waste of tax payer money let private Enterprise in."
And now the same people who said that, have been convinced that private industry is stealing.
This part doesn't match my experience?
"NASA is a waste" is, broadly, a conservative/Republican stance. Almost everyone I've seen outraged about the Tesla launch was noticeably left of the average Democrat. I don't think a narrative of "they hated the public version, now they hate the private version" holds up for the people I've seen.
Granted, there's a second group on the left who hated NASA before and SpaceX now. But that narrative is usually "space exploration is a waste when people are going hungry", with not much concern about public/private status.
It's definitely now also a Far Left talking point. Larry Wilmore basically went back to the old 60's, "Why is there poverty, and we're putting men on the moon?" There's a scene somewhere where he's telling Bill Nye to STFU about his Science. This brings to mind Phillip DeFranco's t-shirt about substituting feelings for facts.
I would entertain an argument that Google Fiber hasn't actually helped society very much but I have a hard time buying that it's been harmful... At worst, it's driven the other players in the regions it's in to offer more bandwidth for less money. At best, it headed off rising a trend of ISPs deceiving the public about what was possible in an effort to suppress speeds and tightly meter bandwidth...
What?
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/16983744/spacex-tesla-falc...
All of that money came from somewhere. Do you wonder why most of your local retailers went out of business, and you can't visit a local bookstore or camera shop anymore? It's related to why Jeff Bezos has so much money that he has nothing better to do than shoot stuff into space. Preferably, he will shoot bigger stuff farther than Elon Musk, Richard Branson, or Paul Allen.
It could also be used somewhere else. Is shooting suicidal volunteers at Mars really the best use of billions of dollars?
Solving difficult engineering problems is usually good for the world.
Adam Smith directly says vanity is what took down feudalism. We surely dont want our billionaires to not even spend the money they have!
Printing money and setting it on fire would employ printers and firefighters. I'm not sure Billionaire Space Wars are a net harm to society, but they're pretty silly.
Apparently, "Don't be Evil" doesn't cover internal company politics.
I remember at a previous job, there was this hefty trans-atlantic data link the company was leasing. All the VPs coveted it, so the political machinations basically resulted in no-one using it, ever, all the while we were paying not-insignificant funds for it.
You conveniently ignored Musk almost went bankrupt after 3 failures initially at space x.
I don't doubt you, but I would definitely expect that sort of messaging even if the true primary goal for GF was to be disruptive, as opposed to profitable.
FWIW, if I were aware of other plausible explanations for the way Fiber has progressed, Occam's Razor would compel me to believe those explanations versus defaulting to cynicism.