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> This move might be good for Google, but I find it somewhat alarming as a consumer. Those who control or curate content (Google, NBC/Comcast, Facebook) should not control infrastructure.

I don't know about you, but I'll take Google over Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, etc. any day of the week, regardless of their conflicts of interest. Google has a proven track record of doing things in my favor.

> Google has a proven track record of doing things in my favor.

The current, publicly acknowledged level of intercourse between Google and the U.S. Federal Government is already worrisome. Perhaps your data has been a part of those exchanges, perhaps it hasn't. You and I don't know.

Now, imagine that Google begins relaying traffic unrelated to their services on behalf of internet users. It isn't hard to fathom that Google will come under the same pressures to give the U.S. government access to user traffic as have Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and others.

That could just be the tip of the iceberg though. How long before the company caves in and decides to start including user internet traffic analysis into the search engine's signaling and ranking? Would it still be doing you a favor?

Edit: typo

> The current, publicly acknowledged level of intercourse between Google and the U.S. Federal Government is already worrisome. Perhaps your data has been a part of those exchanges, perhaps it hasn't. You and I don't know.

We've known for a fact that companies like AT&T have been working closely with the NSA for years. So it seems like Google is the better choice here.

Yes, Google hands over some of your data to the government. But as far as I am aware, Google tells you when requests have been made for your email account, and when search results have been censored. If your account is accessed by anyone but you, Google will notify you that you have been hacked.

Do I believe Google tells the whole truth? I'm not 100% convinced, but I can't know that. What I do know is that even if they tell 5% of the truth about government interaction with your data, this is several times more information than AT&T, Comcast, or Verizon tell you. Most of the time your data is simply handed over on a simple request. At least Google attempts/pretends to put up a fight.

Is it worrisome that I would accept 5% of the truth? Yes. But that goes to show how shady everyone else is. While immoral cooperation has no excuse, I would still point more blame to the government that makes the requests in the first place. Always assume your security is lost the minute the data touches a public pipe unless you take deliberate attempts to secure it.

> But as far as I am aware, Google tells you when requests have been made for your email account

I could be mistaken, but I think the PATRIOT act permits the US government to obtain your personal information without you being informed.

Does that mean they CANNOT notify you or its up to the discretion of the entity handing over the data? If the latter it still makes a strong case that a notification system would be used for such things if one exists for similar circumstances.

If the government issues an NSL then you are prohibited from notifying anyone of its existence, and they are not subject to judicial oversight. They are issued solely at the discretion of the government, and if you receive one you cannot talk about it.

Who owns most of the fiber? Do they already have arrangements with the government? The answer is yes. So why the alarmism specific to Google?

> Google has a proven track record of doing things in my favor.

Thus far.

The point still stands, as a principle – that sort of combination of function/power and interests has, historically, not been one that has resulted in good things for consumers, in the long run.

I don't dispute that. But the other option are the companies I listed, which also have conflicts of interest and have repeatedly abused their control of telecommunications to favor the other branches of their businesses in the past. So I'd rather go with Google, which doesn't have a history of abuse.

> Google has a proven track record of doing things in my favor.

Don't forget all the horror stories of trying to sort out customer support issues. Given the range of issues that supplying internet to houses can have, this would discourage me a lot.

It's fine today, but what about when the management changes? And I'm sure, Google's management change could easily occur during our lifetime. Heck, look at Apple and Microsoft. Steve Jobs -> Tim Cook and Bill Gates -> Steve Ballmer.

If you believe that Google's management and board is willing to consider the public interest in day-to-day business decisions, there's no reason you can't believe they will consider it in a management succession plan.

Wasn't ATT before the divestiture their day's equivalent of an owner of infrastructure and a controller, if not owner, of "content?" You got good, reliable service. What was more reliable than the phone?

You got good, reliable service until anything went wrong or you tried to change anything or you tried to get a less nosey line to use a modem on or you wanted to use a different style of phone.

etc.

Is this kind of like how you get good, reliable service from Google until "anything goes wrong", like your Adsense account is erroneously suspended, your site is erroneously blacklisted from their search results, or your Gmail account is erroneously disabled and/or deleted? There is story after story after story of what happens when your interactions with Google require human attention, and it's not pretty.

Yes, exactly!

When there is no competition then companies can afford to be lazy or ignore customer complaints. AdSense has no real competition, so Google just doesn't care if they have one less customer.

In the local access area, fiber from Google would increase competition, so would be a good thing.

And that's my point. That's Google's equivalent future.

I think Google Fiber provides increased competition for local access. That is the opposite of ATT.

(Or is this sarcasm fail somewhere?)

What content did AT&T own or control?

Voice, the content of the day. It's a stretch.

Definitely, since they neither owned or controlled people's conversations.

With track record, hope the customer service is an improvement.

While your concerns are legitimate - content should not control infrastructure; look at cellular carriers for the case study - there are also wins that are worth thinking about.

Not to be Pollyana; Google needs to be watched. So we all keep each other in check. The following disruptive moves benefit Google _and_ your average Joe:

1. Reduce bandwidth costs. Google pays to send data and we pay to receive it. This is just your classic elimination of the middleman, in this case the anti-competitive backbone and last-mile carriers. In theory the first to benefit from this are the startups with large bandwidth bills today.

2. Reduce delays associated with new tech. Google wants new tech like a larger TCP Initial Congestion Window [1], IPv6, SPDY / HTTP 2.0, or Strict Transport Security [2] to happen faster. As long as your average Joe has a fast enough pipe, these are a win-win. The lag in adoption comes from slow-moving risk-averse players, such as incumbent backbone providers.

3. Reduce mobile bandwidth costs. Google is already heavily invested in mobile broadband clients. In especially congested areas like New York, anything to reduce mobile broadband costs benefits Android first: the top tier of customers who don't feel the costs are probably using iOS.

There are more win-win situations but those are my top 3.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tcpm-initcwnd-00 [2] http://dev.chromium.org/sts

I don't get why anyone thinks any company should control infrastructure. We don't have private electric lines, or private roads that are corporate funded. We don't expect train tracks to be privately laid. Our entire phone and cable infrastructure were built by private companies (mainly AT&T) by getting tremendous government subsidies and being effectively publicly funded for private enterprise.

There is absolutely no reason that any local government in the US worth its weight in salt couldn't start a fiber to the home initiative where they take a tax hike for a few years to pay off laying fiber to everyone in the district. They could contract with neighbor regions, or with private long line services like Level3 to provide internet access, and then nobody gets ripped off when they get a telecom monopoly in their area, because it is a publicly owned utility.

It is getting to the point where internet access is so ubiquitous and essential that we need to see the rise of public fiber and wifi to enable competition in an area where for the last 30 years there has only been collusion and monopoly abuse. I consider myself a social libertarian but we have proven time and time again in history you can not effectively privatize infrastructure and expect long term benefits to society from that.

Most of the U.S.'s railway system was laid by private companies. Similarly, private companies laid much of the electrical grid, too. They are regulated utilities today but were once free companies.

Even when governments build infrastructure they typically contract that work out to private companies. I'll let you decide whether government contractors and bureaucracies are preferable to making the guy who built it have his skin in the game.

More importantly, if someone else wants to build it, as long as they follow rational rules (that can be imposed ex post facto) it is irrational for the taxpayer to clamour to pay for it.

"There is absolutely no reason that any local government in the US worth its weight in salt couldn't start a fiber to the home initiative where they take a tax hike for a few years to pay off laying fiber to everyone in the district."

We. Can. Not. Afford. It.

In case you haven't been paying attention:

Unemployment is high, so new taxes are tougher to sell than usual, and income tax revenue is declining.

Home values have just taken a big hit, so property tax revenue is declining.

The housing market is having a difficult time clearing in many areas; i.e. prices are still too high and there's a surplus of homes, which sit abandoned. This stretches local services (fires, copper theft, copper theft of e.g. gas lines which causes fires, homeless, drug activity, etc.).

Expensive pensions, healthcare, etc. cause costs for government employees to keep going up.

In short, state and local governments are overextended and are feeling a need to cut services, not expand them. The federal government is too, to some extent, but they can essentially print money.

Of course, these are generalizations; they obviously won't apply to every locality.

We. Can. Afford. It.

Laying fiber would create jobs all over the country, not only by employing companies to lay the fiber, but by creating work for the companies that manufacture the fiber. More people working means more tax revenue and it means they have money to spend elsewhere, which in turn creates additional jobs in local regions - once again increasing tax revenues.

What the US cannot afford is to continue to cut federal, state, and local jobs when there is already not enough demand in the private sector to provide anything close to full employment.

In my "Can't. Afford. It," comment [1] I wasn't referring to the trickle-down effects, job stimulus, or long-term return on investment. Those are certainly worthy issues to discuss, but in comment [1] I was limiting myself to saying that, regardless of the merits of the proposal, it might be difficult for many localities to come up with the financial resources to implement it.

> What the US cannot afford is to continue to cut federal, state, and local jobs when there is already not enough demand in the private sector to provide anything close to full employment.

Whether creating jobs should be a goal of government, or merely a side effect of implementing policies, depends on your politics. (It's as much a question of "big-government" vs. "small-government" as "left" vs. "right".)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4294310

> it might be difficult for many localities to come up with the financial resources to implement it.

Which is why they should issue voted-upon bonds, instead of tax incentives to the corps.

One of Google's stated requirements for the fiber project was the ability to impact business. They specifically wanted a location where there was an industrial market without access to reliable high-speed Internet access.

Fiber is a benefit to businesses. When my city installed a fiber line with the assistance of a large regional credit union headquartered here, we also saw a couple data centers and co-location facilities move in. The lines paid for themselves in a more than reasonable time frame.

In reality, the big thing holding back municipal Internet access or the installation of high speed lines is not the lack of money in the government (the government doesn't need to pay a dime). It's that the government is willingly allowing the existing local telco to maintain their monopoly with bans on the installation of new cable. Make it cheap and easy to drop new lines in and the market will expand to fill the desire.

Studies have shown that fiber to a house results in a net increase of about $10K in the house's value. Since typical property taxes are about 1% of the value, any local government that does this is looking at about $100/year extra income per house, ad infinitum.

You can use bonds to pay for fiber, because fiber is infrastructure (like water, electricity, roads).

Here's how I would like to see it: the City provides fiber infrastructure, and charges a base fee for it. This gets your traffic to some termination point(s). If you want access to the Internet, you pay a third party to carry your traffic to/from the Internet past those termination points. It'd be an open market, so carriers would try to undercut each other.

I doubt studies really show any such thing. They probably showed that when fiber is rare in a residential area, it may add $10K to a house value. When it becomes common, it won't.

Not necessarily. Laying fiber might be end up being revenue positive without a tax increase -- depending on the time frame and its effect on stimulating the economy.

The assumption behind any infrastructure being laid is that it will be a net positive gain. You wouldn't consider it otherwise. If everywhere in the US with a population density over around 50 persons per square mile got end to end fiber via local taxes (and to argue the supers problem, if a region can't afford it, they don't have to do it - many localities in the US are prospering just fine, while some are destitute. Its a case by case situation) the benefits to society would be massive.

Same thing with maglev trains along the east and west seaboards. They cost a ton, but in 50 years they would usher in new eras of mobility and an order of magnitude less cost to transport goods extremely quickly.

Some might debate whether what you say is true but it doesn't really matter because it would be political suicide, I think, in the near future to try to push this agenda anywhere outside of the Valley.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Of course it would be preferable to have true structural separation in service providers, having a competitor that has interests that are not aligned with most content publishers is a pretty good consolation prize.

While Google has products that overlap with legacy content publishers, that doesn't appear to have made Google enthusiastic about keeping bandwidth prices up, and content under tight control.

You are completely right, but its just a piece of the puzzle.

The whole market is becoming vertical. There is a war going on who gets to extort content providers, by controlling the access to consumers.

The hardware vendors can control access and demand a slice (apple, amazon). The operating system vendors can control access and demand a slice (microsoft, google). The connection providers can control access and demand a slice (phone/cable companies).

Here in Holland, we now have net neutrality. But maybe thats not enough. Maybe we need app/media store neutrality as well, by requiring OS vendors to allow side-loading. Maybe we need OS neutrality as well, by demanding HW vendors to offer their machienes "rooted".

For now, Google is pro net neutrality, and has not abused their position. Maybe this is just a defensive step. Neverthless, google, like any other ISP should be forced to treat packets neutrally. But that really should be a law, not a contract.

> Maybe we need app/media store neutrality as well, by requiring OS vendors to allow side-loading. Maybe we need OS neutrality as well, by demanding HW vendors to offer their machienes "rooted".

Maybe? There's no question. Manufacturers are already abusing these holes.

While true, I trust Google more than I trust AT&T/Comcast/etc. The major ISPs need some competition. Google will provide it.

Google's corporate motto is "Don't be Evil" and the United States has the 16th fastest broadband speeds in the world, and we invented the damn thing. Comcast, I agree, is a terrible monopolistic crack-baby of the capitalist society but Google is genuinely improving things.

What good is a corporate motto if the shareholders can't sue to enforce it? Some good, sure. I always liked it. But it is about as binding as it is well-defined.

Except Google has been acting pretty 'evil' recently.

The disgraceful FRAND abuses, the privacy abuses, the anti-competitive expansion of Google Search. Hence why they are under multiple investigations by ITC, EU, US governments.

So it is far better to assume NOBODY should be trusted.

Except again: In Google vs AT&T, Comcast et al, I'll take Google any day of the week. Their "evil" is a bunch of shit that nobody really cares about, whereas the others actively screw me, running fiber optic cables straight into my apartment and then making sure that even the priciest data plan I can buy is rate limited to the equivalent of mid-2000s DSL.

> The disgraceful FRAND abuses

When has Google, in and of itself, abused FRAND? The only actions I know of happening on FRAND patents are things grandfathered in from motorola - are you blaming those on Google? I think it's far too early to judge Google's behavior wrt to patents. We have to see what they do in their own right.

Google has explicitly endorsed Moto's FRAND policy that many people consider abusive. http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...

I'm curious what you consider (or believe other people consider) abusive about that?

For example, all of the H.264 patents except Motorola's are licensed for pennies, which is something like 0.25% of the cost of an Xbox. But Motorola wants ~2% for their few H.264 patents. A complex product infringes hundreds of patents; if each one has a 2% royalty then the total royalties exceed the price of the product.

That's certainly an argument that could be had but Google's position on it is not in the document you cited. It specifies that the maximum royalty Google will ever ask for a standards essential patent is 2%. Whether Google approves of asking for 2% in the case you are referring to is not clear to me.

At this point the law suit is way past the phase of negotiating licensing fees and I doubt very much that it is possible to rewind it back to there even if Google wanted to (which I don't see why they would; they know that Apple is intent on banning their devices - Apple's goal is nothing less than the complete destruction of Android as a product, not negotiating reasonable licensing fees).

Google has owned Motorola Mobility for months now and is in every respect in full control of the company. They have had plenty of opportunities to "do the right thing" but have chosen not to.

Google has owned Motorola for sixty four days.

So to be clear you're talking about the inertia regarding the Motorola suit, not any specific action taken by Google executives. So they've been "evil" for two months. I call shenanigans here: you're spinning. No one sane would indict a giant corporate entity on this kind of evidence.

The acquisition closed on May 22nd [1]. While 'months' is technically true, it barely squeaks over the bar, and really not that long when you consider that they might have other priorities, like not losing money.

Thanks for your consistent concern trolling about Google anyway.

[1] http://mediacenter.motorola.com/Press-Releases/Google-Acquir...

the simple answer is don't use services if you don't trust them. If google provides cheaper fiber access in your area, and you'd trust verizon or comcast then use those providers.

Meh, people said the same thing about Chrome but I know of almost no one who thinks that has been bad either for the market or any individual segment of the market.

I know plenty of people that blame Google's interests for Chrome's add block technology lagging significantly behind what was available on Firefox.

Huh? What chrome extension are these people using? Adblock Plus (Beta) blocks pretty much everything.

If previous versions of Adblock are still the base code for the new versions, it doesn't block the ad. It merely hides it. The ad is still loaded, you just don't see it. This limitation is/was because Chrome didn't allow extensions to have the access they would need to actually keep an ad from loading.

I haven't used Chrome with AdBlock in maybe a year or two, so this might be out of date. But that's what it used to be like, and that's where the perception is coming from.

I wish this meme would die. There's a kernel of truth, that initially Chrome didn't support blocking network requests, but that's because of the tradeoff of extension compatibility vs power that Chrome made. Firefox addons (as originally designed at least, I'm not up on their latest efforts) have always been incredibly powerful, but that power comes from calling internal browser APIs that might change from version to version.

Chrome extension apis have to be explicitly designed and developed, and backcompat is taken care of, so your extensions don't all break every six weeks when Chrome updates.

In any case, yes Chrome supports extensions that block or modify network requests before they occur: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/stable/webRequest.h... (and it's been out of experimental for eight months judging by this bug http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=60101)

In addition, Adblock for Chrome has been able to prevent requests from loading using a base webkit api for two years now: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/20/chrome_does_resource...

(Disclosure, I work for Google, but not on anything related to Chrome. I'm just huge fans of the project and its ideals.)

IIRC, whatever was behind that issue was resolved ages ago. Long enough that I can't recall any technical details, unfortunately.

For what it's worth, the FAQ for AdBlock on Chrome claims that it does "actually prevent ads from downloading", and I assume the same is true for (the unrelated) AdBlock Plus on Chrome. http://code.google.com/p/adblockforchrome/wiki/FrequentlyAsk...?

Sounds like a load of FUD to me. DOM elements are DOM elements, aren't they? How would Chrome's JS interpreter be able to discriminate ad content from anything else?

If you want to investigate how it works, open the extensions tab and enable developer mode. You can open 'background.html' for Adblock and check out what it does.

Then what is the point of Ghostery, if it can't keep tracking JavaScript from loading?

> Those who control or curate content (Google, NBC/Comcast, Facebook) should not control infrastructure.

Why not?

> while a high-speed competitor to local cable monopolies is exciting,

It's not just exciting, it's everything. Comcast, TW et al, can get away with being massively valuable enterprises even though they provide the absolute worst service on earth. Any kind of competition for them, can only be a good thing, even if its from another company that controls both content and infrastructure.

> Why not?

Because they will favor transmission of their own content over competing content. See Net Neutrality. This being said, Comcast is already doing this and I trust Google more than the big 3 internet providers.

In general I would agree, however I feel that this is more of a reaction to poor infrastructure than a land grab "let's control everything" move.

I am more concerned about current internet providers blocking technology for sake of their vested interest in old ways of business. Unlimited and unrestrained internet access is something so important and one of the basic needs. This morning I heard that ATT requires you to buy additional plans for Facetime. After data caps by all vendors, this is heights of absurdity.

> This move might be good for Google, but I find it somewhat alarming as a consumer. Those who control or curate content (Google, NBC/Comcast, Facebook) should not control infrastructure.

I agree. I hope this spurs competition, more than anything else.

Your phone company is the same. They store trove of data about you, you'd be surprised.

You're worried about Google censoring content or protocols?

I think it is more about anitcompetitive effects.

Consider a service competing with Youtube; will they have the same streaming performance when delivered over Google's fiber as Youtube? It might even just be accidental (say, Google colocates it's services with its fiber infrastructure) - but it could easily give competitors a big disadvantage if they can't get access to the same performance as Youtube has.

say, Google colocates it's services with its fiber infrastructure

This is actually the defense Comcast is using with their IPTV services. They don't have to pay anything to move that data over public lines, so they don't "charge" extra for it (by "charge", I mean putting it against the caps they recently removed). On the other hand, Netflix et al does go across public lines that Comcast does have to pay for, and they do "charge" for that because they themselves are being charged for it.

Local CDNs are troublesome when it comes to the difference between WAN and last-mile prices for content providers/deliverers.

I would tend to agree. Google has been extremely monopolistic lately. The only reason for Google+'s and Google Chat's relative success is shoving it down the throats of users of GMail's throats. Google mission has moved from organizing to controlling the world's information. I really liked the former, and I'm pretty scared of the latter.

I want fast fiber. I also want to avoid another evil monopoly from taking over the computing landscape. I miss the old, trustworthy, don't-be-evil Google.

OK I guess I consider anticompetitive QOS to be a form of content censorship.

It'll be interesting to see if the announcement addresses your concerns.

ISPs can already directly peer and setup a local node for Google CDN.

Ideally, the goal is to be like Tesla Motors, a catalyst for the industry.