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Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age who also ironically shares a name with a telecom fatcat, has published an analysis of the recent Google fiber deal in Huntsville Alabama. This deal differs from all previous deals in that the city will build and own the fiber network and that Google has only committed to lease capacity on it, leaving the city the option to lease to other internet service providers and thus engender competition for internet access. It is a utility model for connectivity that has had great success in other nations, but is contrary to the way American telecom corporations view their role in the broadband market.
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Author: Google Fiber Just Began the "Golden Age" of High Speed Internet Access
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I'm wearing PAMPERS!!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 11 2016, @06:13AM
Will the local neighborly collective ISP be able to compete against Google and other giants that have more experience and greater scale?
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(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Friday March 11 2016, @07:32AM
I don't see how the bigger players will have overly much more of an advantage. the ISP is a "dumb pipe" as some refer to it, and there are plenty of experts who know how to run an ISP. I'm sure it would be quite easy to poach some of the big cable co's talent, possibly even for a small pay cut!
If my choices were between good service run by Google, or good service run by Local Techshop I would opt for the local every time. Even if Google offered a cheaper option, it would have to be ridiculously cheaper for me to entrust my privacy to them. Instead of needing to use Google's services to be tracked by them, anyone using them as an ISP would automatically have their unencrypted data vacuumed into the cloud.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 11 2016, @08:34AM
That's what I was wondering. I haven't seen any news that Google is violating people's privacy, but I wouldn't exactly trust them, given their business model. Maybe most other ISPs (mainly the big ones) can't be trusted either, but that applies to Google even more so.