Chris Saaca, a senior Google executive was quoted in the New York Times earlier this month conceding that Google's wiring of its home town of Mountain View, California with free WiFi service, "a city of 72,000 residents, cost roughly $1 million, an amount that Mr. Saaca said
demonstrated the low barriers to deploying such a service." (emphasis added)
In the same article Saaca is also quoted saying: "I think there wouldn't be a Net Neutrality debate in this country if we really had a competitive environment for access." Does Google's hubris and hypocrisy know no bounds?
Google has proven it can compete in broadband and admits their are low barriers to broadband competition! Using a very rough calculation, if it only cost Google $1 million to serve 72,000 Mountain view residents it could probably serve most of the entire US population for ~$4 billion.
Google currently has ~$115 Billion market value, has ~$8 Billion in cash available, and no debt. Microsoft is in an even better financial position than Google. And eBay and Yahoo's finances are extremely strong. All these companies could easily afford to develop thier own competitive wireless broadband networks. Google has also invested in broadband over powerline. These online giants all could have bid on the FCC's current wireless Broadband spectrum auction that T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T. a Cable group, and a DirecTV/Echostar DBS have all participated in.
The online giants don't want to compete in broadband, they don't want to invest in bring affordable competitve broadband service to all americans. They want to Congress to grant them a special interest subsidy, called net neutrality, which would allow them to use the Internet for competitive video distribution and not have to pay for the huge bandwidth consumption this would entail. They essentially want the government to pass a law to grant them permanent freeloader status!
Congress should tell Google, Microsoft, eBay and Yahoo to stop whining and start competing and investing!
