[sideband]

You could say that Google Fiber was a response to Comcast's announcement of its intent to acquire NBC in December 2009.

Google makes no money if they can't show ads to people, and at the time Comcast and friends controlled Google's access to a majority of US audiences that Google's customers (advertisers) wanted their ads in front of. Advertising in the US was more than half of Google's revenue then. Comcast had the only network nationally capable of reliably delivering video and video ads, which was prioritized for growth within Google around then.

I think there was a real fear within Google about the leverage Comcast and other national ISP's had over them. TLS wasn't common, and advertisers weren't nearly as interested in mobile audiences in 2010: wireless data use was a fraction of what it is now. A well-capitalized Comcast without the regulatory restrictions of AT&T or Verizon could create existential trouble for Google if they really wanted to. Google Fiber could have been Google's way of showing they'd be willing to play hardball if it came to that. Any positive PR that came from it was a great bonus, but they almost certainly never made money from Google Fiber.

[kbenson]

> Google makes no money if they can't show ads to people

I'm really, really hoping that changes drastically in the next decade. It would be really nice if Google started making the majority of their money from compute cloud offerings (a little out there, but that sector is growing much faster than their general business). I think it's essential if Google's ever going to gain some independence from the perverse incentives they've set themselves up for, and I think that's essential for Google (and society in general) as we move forward.

I'm not sure what to do with Facebook. I don't see people paying for that. Then again, with the amount of time people spend glued to Facebook, they could probably make a tidy business offloading general computing tasks to their users through JS. The concept has been brought up before, generally in the discussion of blockchain mining through websites, but at Facebook's scale and usage it's an entirely different story. I imagine Facebook could have the largest weather supercomputer in the world (by many factors) next week if they really wanted to.

I wonder if Facebook has a department whose job it is to look into developing more parallelizable algorithms for common workloads...

[username223]

Fundamentally, both Google and Facebook live by questionable morals: Google is a surveillance company trying to branch out, while Facebook is a surveillance and behavioral manipulation company doubling down. Google has some smart engineers, who could maybe make a viable version of the 60s mainframe business when the ad bubble pops. Facebook... I'd pay a couple bucks a month to keep up with acquaintances in a way that's easier than an email list or private Usenet group. But I see them taking the dark path and e.g. selling "consumer profiles" that aren't "credit reports," because "credit reports" are governed by laws.

[rtx]

Personal CRM.