I am always amazed when people can't figure out that google is doing this because their business model is based on "targeted advertising", which necessarily requires gathering as much personal information as possible.
All of their products are designed to give them different kinds of data, and being the man-in-the-middle to the entire internet on a per-household basis gives Google an incredibly fine-grained picture of the patter-of-life of the people that use their ISP service.
Being able to steal Comcast's market is just a nice side benefit.
And I'm always amazed at the lengths people will go to in pushing the "Google is an ad company" trope.
Your argument doesn't make sense, especially not with the rapid migration of traffic to SSL (and no, Google aren't MITM'ing SSL connections). The lifetime value of a single family's worth of ad-eyeballs simply isn't there to justify an undertaking of the size of Fiber.
Yes, they are ultimately an ad-company, but that doesn't mean that there is always a single-hop connection between any Google activity and ad revenue. If there's an ad angle here, it's in enabling end users to consume much larger quantities of ad-supported content.
The whole reason Google is developing Fiber? They want everyone in the US to have a fat pipe so they can deliver services / advertising over it. They cherry-picked a few markets where overbuilding is potentially profitable and post stories about it all over Google News. That puts pressure on ISPs to deliver a better product, because honestly customers didn't see a need for gigabit pipes before. They still don't really, but Google tells them they need it so people think they do.
Google will never expand Fiber to the entire country, and I'd be surprised if they don't sell the infrastructure to another company in 5-10 years once they've achieved their goals. If the ISPs are providing better service, customers can upload more personal / sensor data to the cloud for Google to mine, and Google can cram more ad-laden services down the pipes. It's a win/win for them.
This whole endeavor is about Google flexing its muscles as a media power player to ensure their content/ads aren't held for ransom by any ISPs. Any company can try to build a national fiber network; but it takes Google (and their army of media contacts thanks to Google News) to talk this much about what amounts to a minuscule infrastructure investment (~$150 million over 5 years - or about what Comcast spends on infrastructure in a week).
Always a good idea to weigh financials heavily when analyzing a company's strategy. After all, that's what the C-suite and investors are doing. Granted, they have more info than us, the public, but sources of revenue are an important part of the framework for sure.
Perhaps it makes more sense that Google is investing in high-cost infrastructure because they want to move away from the ad-model business. It's risky to have 95% of your revenue coming from a single industry.
Google can eat a lot of the costs of setting up a better network, which is a great investment in the future if you're betting that a majority of people will need high speed internet access 10-20 years from now. Then they can start extracting monopoly profits just as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast etc. do now.
Except that it's a terrible idea. Why would you take billions you make from doing work at a 30-40% margin and blow it buying a business that returns 5-10% margin at scale -- but only after 5-10 years of cash flow negative investment? Wouldn't a better idea be to invest in businesses that could potentially return 20% and are closer to your core skills as a business?
Google has many skills, but last-mile delivery networks aren't one of them. Not that they can't be, but it's just not that profitable of a business to waste their time on. The business itself is just a math problem balancing quality of service with investment -- and not a particularly difficult one.
Fortunately, that's not their play here: Google has invested far too little money in Fiber to be truly serious about it as a business. Fiber is just their way of generating consumer demand for higher speed pipes by saying "hey, look at this! this is how it should be!" They did the same thing on Android with the Nexus phones, so it's not even a new tactic for them.
> Google can eat a lot of the costs of setting up a better network, which is a great investment in the future if you're betting that a majority of people will need high speed internet access 10-20 years from now.
The problem is that you can't just build the network and be done with it. It costs a lot of money to maintain and provide service (approx. 10% of the original cost of the network per year), and that's money that Google will want to spend on other, more profitable things. Hell, if they want to get into infrastructure, the smart play would be free wireless Internet for the developing world (i.e. what Facebook is doing).
But again, Google hasn't spent anywhere near the amount of money on Fiber that they would need to in order to make it a commercially successful business. Because that's not the point: they're using cities like Kansas City and Austin to showroom their vision of what the Internet should be.
Genuinely curious here: what additional data would Google get as an ISP that it doesn't already get via search, Gmail, ads, etc? Or do you mean "man-in-the-middle" in the cryptographic sense, and you think Google is playing mini-NSA and start spoofing Facebook certs so it can eavesdrop on SSL connections or something?
See also Google Fiber's privacy policy:
Other information from the use of Google Fiber Internet (such as URLs of websites visited or content of communications) will not be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, except with your consent or to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.
with your consent - when's the last time you actually read a the terms and conditions of your account?
Honestly even if you take that as meaning they won't ever track history of internet access to a google account, why would you assume they need to do that, just to have more information on you?
It's not like you escape their privacy invating antics if you just use google search (or a site with google ads) without an account.
A variety of ISP's (Comcast, MTNL, IDEA) also run MITM attacks and inject ads in pages, sometimes on behalf of law enforcement. I imagine they inject tracking as well.
Well the problem with info gathered via search, GMail, etc. is that they can only capture info about things that go through their servers. With access to the Internet connection you can gather info about other sites the user visits, when they're typically online, how long they spend playing XBox, etc.
Just knowing that I visit the sites that I do is more than google gets now. Although I have a legacy google account, I'm never logged in. I don't use gmail. So the only thing they know about me is when I visit a site displaying their ads. If they were my ISP, they'd know everywhere I go, they'd know who I use for email, they'd know my address and my payment reliability. Probably lots more, I'm not as smart as they are.
While they certainly can pull a man-in-the-middle in the cryptographic sense (DJB gave an outstanding talk[1] that discusses this problem), you seem to be assuming a lot. Google doesn't get much data from me at all (spyware like google analytics is blocked at the router, and I started blocking ads before Firefox existed). Even if you ignore that, there is a lot of traffic that Google normally doesn't have access to that they would be able to log as the ISP.
They get some of this already when people choose to hand Google their DNS traffic, but being the ISP makes this complete. You may want to also watch Aral Balkan's talk posted just above DJB's at the same URL; he does a better job than I can at describing how Google (and Facebook, etc) are using surveillance-as-a-business-model.
> Google Fiber's privacy policy
The risk of a national security letter (which the part you quoted includes as an exception) is already enough of a reason to limit how much personal data is in a single database, that's not the main problem. That policy isn't a binding contract. Do you really think it won't be changed the moment someone at Google decides it would be profitable?
They promised "Nest" data would stay separate, too, which quickly changed to sharing "limited" data. Sorry, but promises not to snoop don't mean much when the promise contradicts their business model.
All of their products are designed to give them different kinds of data, and being the man-in-the-middle to the entire internet on a per-household basis gives Google an incredibly fine-grained picture of the patter-of-life of the people that use their ISP service.
Being able to steal Comcast's market is just a nice side benefit.