Google to Telcos:’Broadband? We Don’t Need No Steenking Broadband!’

Just what is Google up to? The company is apparently seeking dark fiber, possibly to create its own global network backbone.

A job listing on Google’s Web site titled “Strategic Negotiator, Global Infrastructure” seeks individuals experienced in brokering bandwidth and peering deals around the world. It could just be to support new regional data centers for localized Google services … or it could be part of an unfolding strategy to expand Google’s business and cut broadband providers off at the knees.

If you look at the other things that Google has either recently announced or inadvertently revealed — its video store, Google Pack, free Wi-Fi service, etc. — it all seems to add up to something. And I think that something is a detour around the increasingly belligerent bandwidth providers who want a piece of Google’s action.

AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre has said (both before the AT&T merger with SBC, where he was previously CEO, and afterward) that he wants Internet content providers to pay a “carriage fee” for the privilege of uninterrupted packet streams to customers connected to AT&T’s networks. The continuing consolidation of the telecom backbone and broadband businesses, along with comments like Whitacre’s, has raised concerns about the future of network neutrality — the equal treatment of all traffic passed between peered Internet providers — both in Congress and in the boardrooms of Internet content companies like Google.

At the same time, Google has been running out of breathing room in the Internet advertising space. Many observers think that click-through advertising is reaching its limits, particularly with all the “click-fraud” out there. So Google is looking to new services to deliver different kinds of advertising — including print.

What’s the next step? Broadcast. And by broadcast, I mean IP broadcast.

Here’s a possible scenario: Google buys up excess fiber capacity to build its own dedicated spur of the Internet, which it connects to Wi-Fi and WiMax access points in major urban areas. It then offers free Internet access and access to its own IP-TV video services. It introduces a line of set-top boxes or partners with a PC company to provide Google media PCs, which plug into televisions and put Google Search on the screens of millions of households. It disintermediates Internet providers and television networks, and controls the full spectrum of advertising. Or, it uses this capability as a bargaining chip to get concessions from ISPs and media companies, rather than having to pay freight charges.

Wireless IP media is the next frontier — it uses unlicensed spectrum, it can be locked down to specific subscribers, and it has the potential to carry as much bandwidth as today’s broadband networks. Google is a media company disguised as a technology company, and it might just be about ready to shed its disguise.

~ by Sean Gallagher on January 17, 2006.