We won. Why shouldn’t you believe it?
Google finally ‘fessed up to ditching its fiber construction business. In a blog post worthy of Baghdad Bob, the (now) former head of Google Fiber and related businesses – Craig Barratt – promised to “stay ahead of the curve — pushing the boundaries of technology, business, and policy — to remain a leader in delivering superfast Internet“. As he also announced his resignation.
By the time you read this, Google Fiber’s website might have changed, I’m sorry, pivoted again, but as it stands Californian cities are either transitioning from potential fiber city limbo to incumbent monopoly hell, or have been blessed as “Webpass cities”.
Which amounts to the same thing.
As the dust settled on Barratt’s mea culpa mission accomplished declaration, the Silicon Valley communities of San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto were left in the potential category, where Google is “going to pause our operations and offices”.
Translation: we’re done with you, but we’re not going to actually say it because we’d lose whatever leverage remains over AT&T, Comcast and the rest.
Google is also “ever grateful to these cities for their ongoing partnership and patience, and we’re confident we’ll have an opportunity to resume our partnership discussions once we’ve advanced our technologies and solutions”.
Translation: so long and thanks for all the fish.
But San Francisco, where it had previously said it was in the fiber business, San Diego where it said it might some day be, and Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville where it’s never previously shown any interest, Google is now proclaiming as “Webpass cities”.
Translation: we bought Webpass, we’re not sure why anymore, but we own those customers there, so we’re going to claim them and hope no one notices the difference.
The possible, but not likely, exception is Irvine, which Google still lists as “upcoming”. Given the dismantling of its fiber construction operations, that’s a distinction without a difference: if there isn’t fiber there already, there never will be. Not from Google, at least, but almost certainly not from any competitive private sector player either.