What have we learned from Google Fiber?

[Commentary] There is no question that Google Fiber is a seminal development in the broadband market. The question is what is the lesson for policy?

Karl Bode writes that Google Fiber proves the National Broadband Plan was nothing more than a "political show pony." He chastises the National Broadband Plan for not doing enough for competition. The core policy related to network competition, however, that he proposed was forcing incumbents to offer an open access network, in which the incumbents would offer all, or parts, or their networks to rival providers at wholesale rates. Under Bode's proposal, which others also supported, the government would define both what parts of the network would be "unbundled" and set the rates.

The National Broadband Plan team evaluated, and then rejected this option, believing it would not lead to investments to deploy the next generation networks necessary to deliver the affordable, abundant bandwidth America needed. As Google Fiber, which emerged from discussions with the team developing the National Broadband Plan, started evaluating the economics of building a fiber network, it concluded that building a network that it shared with other providers would not make economic sense, even on an unregulated basis. Google, therefore, decided to proceed with a proprietary model. If the government had required open access that required Google to share its infrastructure with competitors, Google Fiber would have been stillborn. The lesson here is competition does not arise from the desire for it; it comes from rules that attract investment into competitive networks.