In 2013, when Google announced that Kansas City would be the first city in the country to have Google Fiber, I bought a house in the first neighborhood that was being wired up with Google's gigabit Internet.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In general, we need America to take its game up a notch when it comes to broadband. It's important to acknowledge the billions and billions of dollars of investment in fiber. But we need more.
When you lower the cost of access to space, a boom of innovation follows, just as low-cost fiber optics paved the way for the Internet and the cloud services that followed.
The first wave of the Internet was really about data transport. And we didn't worry much about how much power we were consuming, how much cooling requirements were needed in the data centers, how big the data center is in terms of real estate. Those were almost afterthoughts.
As people talk, text and browse, telecommunication networks are capturing urban flows in real time and crystallizing them as Google's traffic congestion maps.
We feel there is already widespread broadband available today.
Kansas City is one of the most convenient airports in the nation.
We had been busy building up fibre infrastructure under the ground in Hong Kong and underneath the homes of people, so when we launched IPTV, it was relatively smoother sailing than in other territories.
Google's entire business model and its planning for the future are banking on an open and free Internet. And it will not succeed if the Internet becomes overly balkanized.
And the more broadband we can get globally, the better. It's better for the world; it's better for our advertisers; it's better for Google.
We were the first urban school system in the country to wire all of our schools for the Internet.