Our world, in bits and bytes

GOOG doing evil? Or just playing smart?

Getting serious for a bit now!

For you mobile heads, as you know, the FCC’s 700 Mhz spectrum auction is winding down with incumbent carriers paying staggering amounts for their piece of ether.  There has been much excitement about GOOG getting in on the action to set up a nationwide carrier.  But by all accounts, Google is not really signing up for spectrum at all.   However their threat of entry and lobbying of the FCC resulted in both VZW and AT&T opening up their networks to foreign devices and applications (read Android).  So GOOG gets to play the game without the large capex layout of rolling out a nationwide high speed wireless network.  There probably is a game theorist somewhere at Googleplex smiling right now.