In Google We Trust

For the sec­ond time in as many months, Google appears to have shown polit­i­cal lead­er­ship where our own gov­ern­ment, the US gov­ern­ment, has been lack­ing. Last month, it was with the stand­off with China and last night, it was with the announce­ment that it would take a lead­er­ship posi­tion on how the US should think about broad­band: 1 Giga­byte, yes, that’s Giga­byte, to the house and no less.

For months now, the FCC has been work­ing on defin­ing a broad­band roadmap for the coun­try but sadly, in dis­cus­sion with peo­ple both inside and out­side the FCC, it appears that the agency has got­ten kid­napped by the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion indus­try, often times par­rot­ing lines that come straight out of the industry’s mouthpieces.

While the plan is not due for another month, I can tell you that, as late as a few weeks ago, the FCC was think­ing of set­ting the def­i­n­i­tion of national broad­band at a laugh­able speed of 3Mb per sec­ond, a speed so low that some of the larger providers don’t even offer it any­more. The rea­son­ing is that it would be achiev­able and good enough for most appli­ca­tions today.

In Decem­ber, at a con­fer­ence spon­sored by the Aspen Insti­tute, I chal­lenged mem­bers of the broad­band task force to think more aggres­sively and was pre­sented with a bar­rage of “well, in our stud­ies of inter­na­tional broad­band trends, we have not find a sin­gle use case, out­side of P2P piracy, for higher speed net­works.” I coun­tered that this type of think­ing, had it been applied to the year 1999 would have made 56k the rule of the land. To think based on today’s lim­i­ta­tions is to limit tomorrow’s oppor­tu­ni­ties and it appears that our gov­ern­ment is about to do it again.

At the time, I did not have any exam­ples of poten­tial use for a higher speed net­work (and mind you, I was advo­cat­ing 100Mbps to the home, not 1Gbps as Google is) but for­tu­nately, with the suc­cess of Avatar in movie the­aters, and the unveil­ing of blu­Ray in 3D and TV sets and TV sta­tions in 3D, it appears that poten­tial use case for those types of net­works could develop in the form of con­sumer gen­er­ated 3D high def­i­n­i­tion video stream (with, of course, high def­i­n­i­tion audio accom­pa­ny­ing it). Such a model could require a sub­stan­tial amount of data to be pushed down the pipes and far exceed what our net­works cur­rently can do.

Enters Google, a com­pany that lives and dies by the amount of inter­net access avail­able. Their prod­ucts can­not exist with­out an open inter­net (an exam­ple of how a less open inter­net access affects Google can be seen in today’s report that Iran banned access to Gmail) and increas­ingly, their ambi­tions require faster inter­net access, whether it is to offer video, tele­phony, or other ser­vices. An effi­cient inter­net and, increas­ingly, a fast inter­net, is what they need to grow. Hav­ing tried play­ing nice, it looks like the com­pany is now decid­ing to take the gloves off in its fight with the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion indus­try by throw­ing the gaunt­let down.

It’s not the first time Google decides to throw its weight, and sub­stan­tial cash hoard, around to help it accom­plish longer term changes in the tele­coms indus­try. Three years ago, the com­pany man­aged to get wire­less phone net­works to be more open by threat­en­ing to enter the mar­ket.

Sadly, it appears that our gov­ern­ment is more beholden to the inter­est of the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion indus­try than it is to help­ing the coun­try regain its lead­er­ship role in the tech­nol­ogy world. The last decade has seen the US stum­ble from a lead­er­ship posi­tion in broad­band speed to not even mak­ing the top 10. And our gov­ern­ment is about to sup­port this ane­mic state with a pol­icy that will fail to really pro­vide the coun­try with what it needs to remain competitive.

Google, on the other hand, is look­ing to the future and sees that, unless some­thing rad­i­cal is done, the coun­try will slip fur­ther behind. By announc­ing that they will deliver 1 Gbps to half a mil­lion homes, they hope to get the com­pet­i­tive juices flow­ing into the tele­coms indus­try. If I were them, I would shoot for high con­cen­tra­tion places like New York or San Fran­cisco to demon­strate the capa­bil­i­ties at a faster rate and hit right into some of the most com­pet­i­tive mar­kets, poten­tially hurt­ing the mar­gins of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion com­pa­nies if they don’t play along.

There are, of course, many chal­lenges to Google becom­ing a broad­band provider. The com­pany already knows a lot about users and becom­ing a broad­band provider would give them access to even more infor­ma­tion, poten­tially cre­at­ing con­cerns about pri­vacy. There is also some­thing clearly self-serving to Google’s approach in this but, as was the case with its ear­lier stance on China, its inter­est seem to be aligned with the consumer’s. I wish the gov­ern­ment would react in the same way.

Update (Feb­ru­ary 16, 2009): It looks like the FCC is finally start­ing to move in the right direc­tion on the band­width issue.

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