Did Google do the political work here and leave the door open for competition?
Southwestern Bell and its sister baby bells were subsidized to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in the 90s in exchange for a promise to roll out a nationwide network of fiber to the home. Needless to say the network never materialized but the telecoms kept the money.
Ref: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...
Here, in the Bay Area, the majority of the LEC lines belonged to Pacific Bell (You can almost always tell who the "real" company is by looking at the cable-vaults, the names of the holding company is written in engraved/raised metal that will last for 100+ years). The SF Giants Stadium was born as "PacBell Park"
Somewhere around 1997/1998, SBC Acquired all of Pacific Bell - so 100% of the PacBell LEC lines became SBC lines. Your Phone Bill now read "SBC", and a few years later, PacBell Park became SBC Park.
Then, in 2005, SBC acquired AT&T, and, because AT&T had a stronger global brand, they changed their name to be "AT&T", even though AT&T was now just one component of the larger SBC.
What's really confusing, is somewhere around 2003/2004, LEC competition was deregulated a bit, and the 2003 AT&T starting offering Local Phone services in the Bay area.
So, you ran into scenarios where you would get a visit from both AT&T and SBC trying to sell you local phone services. I actually purchased a pretty good sized Long Distance/Data/LEC package from AT&T for around $15K MRC for our office buildings in Sunnyvale.
The reason this is confusing, is that when SBC acquired AT&T, you now had two classes of AT&T customers, those with SBC legacy facilities, and those with AT&T legacy facilities. For about 5 years after the acquisition, every telecom consultant I dealt with avoided the confusion (for some definition of avoid, and confusion) - by continuing to refer to anyone getting their services from 2003 SBC, as "SBC Customers", even though, for the last several years, their phone bill read "AT&T".
So, ironically, for some customers in the Bay Area, AT&T lines actually are AT&T lines, but for most customers, they are SBC/Pacific Bell lines.
I think a lot of people have been unhappy with their service providers for a long time, for more reasons than just the speed.
I realize it's possible since this is a (relatively) expensive paid service, but Google has a lot less experience doing customer service even less than AT&T or Comcast. And their usual approach of "Make a webpage listing common problems" might not work as well for fixing internet service outages.
Incidentally, AT&T did a lot of similar political work for others years ago when they were starting their U-Verse rollout.
They lobbied in numerous states for video franchises to be granted on a state-wide basis, rather than having to go to each individual municipality and negotiate deals. That allowed them to basically steamroll into an area.
When AT&T did this, the laws were written such that the cable companies selling service in the same areas could tear up their contracts with the municipalities and go statewide as well.
"However, in Austin, the agreements that Google has signed with the City of Austin are no different than the ones that AT&T and Time Warner have signed according to Laura Morrison, an Austin city councilwoman."
http://gigaom.com/2013/04/09/take-that-google-att-ups-the-an...
I suspect this overstating the case significantly -- I think its basically right in that Google's prime motivation is to push the market toward widespread, ultra-high speed access. But I think that by the time they launched Google Fiber, and certainly before they expanded it to Austin, they also had a model where it was worthwhile beyond being a lever to move the industry, between direct revenue and the opportunity to use it as leverage to promote the Android ecosystem through the Nexus devices tied to it.
As with the Chrome browser, heck and even Android itself, what Google does with the prime motivation of moving the market (and preventing another vendor from getting/keeping a monopoly which they can leverage against Google) isn't necessarily a "burden".
But to assume that municipalities want a uniform set of rules for all comers would be without basis. Municipalities want to negotiate with vendors to extract concessions.
Laws can be written, without naming names, that apply only to individual firms. Maybe Austin will say that the new rules and incentives only apply to firms below a certain market share. Or to firms that don’t also operate mobile networks. Or firms that have, or don’t have, some geographical footprint. Or which employ a certain number of Texans, or Austinites. Etc.