Many Americans, and in fact, people from all around the world, now inexplicably think of Google Fiber as the Savior of the Internet. Google Fiber is a pretty great technology achievement. Installing a gigabit WAN connection in hundreds of homes isn't an easy task. The main problems I have with Google Fiber isn't that they're actively trying to save the Internet.
Google has known for years that getting people their search results and other services more quickly will keep them using their own services. At this point it's well known that Google is an advertising company at least as much as a technology company, and beefing up infrastructure at both ends of the Google Pipe means that Google can show its users more advertisements per second. In addition, owning the pipe directly into customers' homes means that Google can use that information for more.
The other thing is that has long bothered me about Google Fiber is that it doesn't seem like they're really trying to expand service areas or pick up customers. Because high speed Internet access continues to be completely unregulated in the United States, what Google Fiber has been doing in Kansas City and in Utah has been selectively installing network access in only the neighborhoods that are, in essence, wealthy enough to already have Internet access and to specifically want more. The "We're doing some good!" gimme is that they offer a free plan, with 5/1 megabits of throughput, but initially with a very steep $300 installation fee. They also only guarantee that the free plan will exist for seven years, at which point they reserve the right to not only cancel your service, but to take all of the network equipment they'd provided, including the "Fiber Jack" – Google's parlance for a small fiber to copper media converter, out of your house.
In addition, by operating primarily online and putting time limits on every aspect of the deployment, at least up to this point, they are excluding the people who may have needed to a free connection at a low speed. They have a support phone number, but they do not seem to have a sales phone number, nor do I think you can get put on the waiting list to actually have the service installed by calling the number.
So by the time they think they've gotten as many customers as they can in a city, they move on to the next least regulated, flattest, and most grid-like city. This particular phenomenon is also called "Fiber-to-the-Press-Release" in a play on the normal concept of fiber to the premises. Google announced its intentions on Austin, TX almost a year ago and has yet to make what looks like any actual progress in terms of getting fiber deployed to the customers.
It's possible that all of these factors are simply Google trying to build the most modern network for its customers, but to me it seems ripe for becoming exactly the thing many Americans who are paying attention do not want to come of their home Internet connections – an exclusionary network only for content provided by a single commercial entity. If anybody's in a position to do this, it's Google.
Many of their customers are already using Google's services for e-mail, text, audio, and video chatting, document editing, as a social network, and getting books, television shows, and music from Google services for the web and for Android. Add Google Drive and YouTube to this and there are definitely people who will be using their Google Fiber pipe to only access Google services. Every ISP wants to be able to keep as much traffic as they can within their own network, but Google is almost certainly living the dream. If at the end of their seven years of "Free Internet" they no longer want to run a public ISP, they're completely within their rights to withdraw service and "cancel" Google Fiber (in much the same way they killed Google Reader) even if all of the other service providers have dried up in a given area.
The other thing they could do, because this industry is completely unregulated, is convert their Internet service into a private network service. This means that customers who want an actual Internet service may need to either pay more to get out of Google's network, or switch back to the existing service providers in those areas.
One other thing that has long bothered me is that there appears to be no way to own your own equipment on the Google Fiber service. The documents I've been able to find indicate that they continue to own the router and other equipment for the service, and unlike any of the "traditional" services, there's no way for you to own the equipment. Similar to my discussion about the different DSL providers, it could be good for Google to be able to request that the equipment be returned and ultimately swapped out at will, but whether or not that actually happens will be interesting to see. I can understand Google's ownership of the Fiber Jack, as that's essentially the same as the ONT/NID or a demarc in a typical telecommunication setup. Google makes the point that they own the LAN too, however.
The other thing I've noticed, and this is the main reason I think that it's mainly about "proving a point" or a hobby as opposed to creating a viable utility Internet Service Provider, is that Google is essentially hand-picking the flattest cities with the least regulations and the most open city councils, and the most grid-like constructions. This is a great idea when you just want to prove a point on the cheap, but I think choosing a city with more challenging geography and a more restrictive council would be a better way to prove the point of privately funding a modern data network in the United States. Building an even wider deployment and actually dropping it to every house would be the next way to make this point.
Limited availability, no existing plans to expand to expand the service within their official area, the question of how serious Google is about the service as a product, and the as of yet unmentioned likelihood that they're using data on what you are sending through the wire for advertising purposes make me uncomfortable with the plan.
One of the Telcos has a gigabit service for one city coming down the pipe, and they offer a $70/mo price point for gigabit networking, although at $70/mo, they're going to be using the connection to advertise to you. For $100/mo, you can opt out of the advertisements. I think it's pretty bad that you specifically need to tell your network service provider that you'd like to opt out of being advertised to, but even at $100/mo, if they're able to deliver anywhere near a gigabit through the pipe, I think I know who I'd be choosing, and I think it's reasonable that the first order of business is to actually get that pipe in place to begin with.
Ultimately, what needs to happen is that the FCC needs to designate high speed Internet access as a regulated common carrier service. Anything less is a disservice to, well, everybody. If the FCC is going to decide that wireless access services (both through the cell phone carriers and via satellites) is "enough" broadband for rural areas, then they need to establish that however a broadband connection is delivered, pricing needs to be fair and reasonable, and it needs to be easy and possible to use the service for anything.
If you're one of the hundreds of lucky Americans to have it, I'm sure Google Fiber is a great option. It's just unfortunate that proving Google's point about high speed Internet access has to come at the cost it does.