@cantankerous_cashew add to the list of heinous stuff the #epsteinclass is using this window of opportunity to get away with. Imagine pretending to be a force for modernization and good, get grants from cities to build infra, then sell said infra to the same scumbag ISPs who already got grants from city/state/local & federal to create monopolies in the first place...truly, fuck you #google. Fuck you.
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2026
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I always thought this was their plan. I used to work for one of the cable companies when this came out. Most of us in the Operations space saw this as an obvious play to bully the big telecom companies to increase speeds and latency to benefit the tech companies. However the execs freaked out and treated them as an existential threat, which is exactly what Google wanted.
They never had any desire to run an Internet company, it costs a ton of money to build out. So they cherry picked relatively dense middle and upper class neighborhoods that would have a good return in a way that the regulated telecoms would not be allowed to. They normalized high speed internet nationally and now they can sell off the business to recoup some of the cost.
I'm not a fan of Google, but as an internet customer, I appreciate the result of this strategy.
Makes sense but since ISPs are essentially a monopoly in fiber, they get to charge whatever they want, despite the fact that I know AT&T's break even cost for 5G fiber is $10 a month per line.
Yeah some (formerly) local fiber companies started out as a way to get decent Internet in places the big ISPs wouldn't touch. Some are still around, but many are getting sold off to the big telcos
There are essentially only three major cable providers in the United States. They have blocked Google Fiber at nearly every turn. I have been unable to get Google Fiber at any address I’ve lived at since it launched.
It is oddly entertaining to watch monopolies that the federal government failed to break up, largely due to their own lobbying, fight each other in an attempt to prevent the others from becoming even more monopolized.
When do no evil finally turns to do evil always. I think this leaves the Woz as the only remnant of when tech was the good guy.
Linus: Am I a joke to you?
I wonder if Linus and woz would be friends
Probably more of a "Highlander" scenario
Good point. Though even when Woz was involved, he was overruled by one of the model tech narcissists, Jobs. But at least he was in the room.
I think we've just created an unregulated system that almost perfectly incentivizes and reinforces evil, so eventually evil is what we get.
Free market capitalism can only serve good with a tight collar and very short leash held by healthy democracy. Maybe it was a bad idea spending 40 years removing and making all leashes and collars for capitalism illegal, and handing the collar and leash to capitalism to put on democracy. But what do I know.
Checks and balances?
Do you mean check marks on my balance sheet for each billion dollar row?
Meanwhile SpaceX spends billions launching thousands of satellites into space and wreck the environment just so people can doomscroll their slop. When all we need are governments building some basic infrastructure like fiber internet for a fraction of the money.
My prior city ran a survey on whether they should build out fiber to the homes around the city, since they were building their own fiber infrastructure anyway. Despite the city saying it would be cheaper and faster than the existing 0 or 1 options people had, my fellow residents cried communism and the city government scrapped the idea. Infuriating.
Americans are too stupid to vote in a lot of cases. why even hold a vote on something like this at all? just get it done. why bother asking permission from people who will answer without understanding the question
Look up easement abuse in the US on YouTube, Lehto's Law or Institute for Justice
From rail, to cable providers, to city municipalities, easements in the US have been utilized maliciously to destroy and seize peoples properties
Why bother asking permission?
In the States, enough people have proven uncivilized enough and willing enough to face the consequences that come with utilizing tools easily and cheaply available at their disposal so that trespassers and even politicians think twice before sending people to mess with other people's land without asking permission
"ran a survey", this was the only clue I needed to realize that they never planned to do it in the first place. Surveys are so easy to manipulate that if someone tells you they made a decision based on a survey, that you can immediately assume that what they are really saying is that they made a decision that they knew would be unpopular, obviously biased, or otherwise disastrous, but they wanted to blame the decision on "other people".
"We're too stupid to have better things," cried Society.
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Australia almost did this right with the National Broadband Network.
Unfortunately, it was then sabotaged by the government after an election changed the majority party.
It seems to be back on track after wasting an extraordinary amount of time and money by installing copper lines, just to completely replace them with the fiber lines that were in the original plan.
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Add another to the graveyard
For those who’ve haven’t seen it:
So all of the easement agreements got pushed through by google, and are being taken over by entities who wouldn't have been able to get those easements due to commujity distrust of their company
I'd sue to have the easement revoked as a community, and for punitive damages hefty enough as a punch to Google's nose to prevent that type of bad behavior from happening in the future
Not chump change, not cost of operations. Actual punitive damages enough to cut out any profits from the transaction and then some
Can I get an ELI5? My understanding is that easements are the fees that customers (either individual or community) pay to get the equipment/infra run to their property for service.
Are you saying that customers wouldn't have paid those easements if it was the normal telecom company doing it, as opposed to Google? If so, what are the "damages" in this case? I'm not understanding for what you could sue.
Theres really no eli5, this is a purposely convoluted topic
Best I could offer you is recomemend you go look up the channels Lehto's Law and The Institute for Justice on YouTube
In the US, easements have a history of being abused to render large areas of privately owned land useless/unusable, to legally trespass, and to harass landowners
There's a reason for example that American Tribes fight especially hard to prevent easements from oil or rail or really any companies
Cable companies in particular have a reputation of destroying peoples properties, have numerous times now been given insane payouts to build the very infrastructure with taxes that they just bought and in those instances pocketed the money without even a slap on the wrist. Further their involvement indicates that any further infrastructure projects expanding that fiber are basically dead, and for any that exist they're going to be on life support
Those same bailout companies just got their hands on the easements that were allowed to go to a group who at the least didn't have that history of abuse, and precedent of the that deal going through so it is more likely to start happening in more places
All of those easements should be considered as dead space and new ones will have to be allocated when expansion is taken up by yet another company on 10 or 20 years when they prove they won't upgrade or properly maintain theirs to modern needs, that means further encroaching on people's property
Think of it like sidewalks that moved another 3-4 feet into people's yards every 10 or so years which you as a homeowner are not allowed to alter or use or complain when their representatives do so
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As for damages
Say you have a old masonry structure like a masonry brick fence in the way of the easement
They can tear it down and will, and will not replace it with one of comparable quality if they bother to at all
Ive seen some beautiful 1950s work like that where it goes from amazing tradesmen quality masonry and iron fencing to jank 4x4's and basically chickenwire on the easement, even 2 sections of the masonry/iron fence would take thousands to fix properly from what they did and there's the likelihood they'll do it again in the future.
Those are homes of people on fixed incomes or investments. They usually can't keep fixing the damage. And those fences aren't really decorations, its not even slightly uncommon for people to die from dog maulings in my area. Happens a few times every single year
Say you have a road, driveway, etc? At some point you will have a massive random pothole or speedbump because they'll cut a trough right through it and fill it with asphalt not repour expensive concrete. I can in my neighborhood point out four locations where cable and fiber easement companies have done just that
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This will enshittivize profit over quality of service.
I always thought the 1Gbps was awesome and perhaps a good incentive for other companies to upgrade (probably more the reason since they're Google and their ad bucks). Recently saw a reason to switch for 2.5, did it then was told by the installer they don't even have cable that does it. Mean. I did it myself and my stream downloads are quite fast, but it'd have been nice if my provider mentioned that in the first place so I knew who had to run the wires. It was only through some holes, behind the sink / dishwasher so not awful but you td have been nice to understand 2.5 was higher than their techs supported.Also needed a switch / router upgrade. Which was actually quite fun to do and minimal cost now can get a mesh wifi going.
Still if your techs can't provide what is needed in cables for your upper end least tell the customer first.
Ugh.
The service has been quite good for ten years.
Guess it was good while it lasted.
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Another one for the Google graveyard.
Locally community owned nonprofit isps are the future. Of you live in an area with that, switch over now. Isps in the next year or so are going to sign Ai data scrapping contracts and allow federal censorship like China's great firewall. You heard it here first.
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They just finished laying Google Fiber in my neighborhood and I was looking at switching. Guess I’m holding on that.
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I don't have any experience with Google Fiber, but I was bummed when Google Domains got sold off, I forgot to whom. Google Domains was so simple. No nonsense.
They sold Google Domains to Squarespace.
which just to happens to be today's sponsor!
I'll be sure to subscribe while connected to my NordVPN account.
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I'm shocked. Totally shocked.
Private equity means rising *prices and dropping quality until it's useless at which point it will be sold off piece by piece. Consumers aren't part of the process except as wallets.
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Yeah fuck everything Google.
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