What I mean by that is, we have 4 million people, and we're not a large place by any means (2,000km in total length, something like that).
If Google wanted to show the world their "vision", they could simply come to NZ, buy a mobile carrier (for millions, not billions of dollars) and give everyone free plans (or whatever their vision is) and lay down fibre to everyone in the country (much faster than the stupid government imo) . They'd even be able to get their awesome self-driving cars on the roads fairly easily, without having to spend so much damn money lobbying.
As per the NZ public, we love new stuff. Right now, we're ripped off in every aspect (consumer-wise). Some massve corporation would change this country in a heartbeat, and for the better. (I'd hope anyway).
New Zealand, in my opinion, has an awesome "sample" size (regarding population). We were one of the first countries in the world to go from cash to using EFTPOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFTPOS) extremely fast.
>> "EFTPOS is highly popular in New Zealand, and being used for about 60% of all retail transactions.[23] In 2009, there were 200 EFTPOS transactions per person"
To me, it makes so much sense for massive corporations to come to NZ, trial their stuff _easily_, and for half the cost (made up number) than it would be to do it in the US.
Once people see how awesome NZ is when it comes to all these self-driving cars, cheap/free internet, cheap phones, and cheap/free phone data/calls/sms surely the rest of the world would want to be just like us? :]
My two cents. :]