I suppose there are enough reasons to think this is possible. And it is possible, like the gPC and gTelco when the news got out that they'd leased a bit of fibre, and goodness knows anyone with dark fibre wants to be a Telco. Wake up, not even Telcos want to be telcos any more. They want to be TV stations, or Video hire outlets or Malls. I suppose a gBrowser and the oft bet gOS are also possible.

But its my firm conviction that Google is both too clever and too wise to invade the Russias of all those markets any time, not soon, ever.

Dark fibre is a customer option, not the first step to Telco-hood. Google contributes financially to Mozilla Firefox for search engine placement. Google is using its weight in the 700MHz auction in the US to get a better deal for its customers, which indirectly, unlike Apple, will benefit Google. The phones its shopping around, AFAIK, are not the result of "hundreds of millions of dollars into developing mobile phone designs," instead they are demo applications on the OpenMoko platform. As for "leaked images," puh-leeze. The alignment with Sprint is I suspect both a pose/feint and one of those non-exclusive things Google does.

If a big beneficiary wants to contribute to some 3rd party open standards for handsets, good for them 3GPP seems obsessed with reinventing in a proprietary way stuff that works just fine already. Products to features, as Doc Searls and others assert, its not about making money with X, but making money because of X.

Google is already suffering staff and product bloat, acknowledged by Eric Schmidt (perhaps its his presence on the Apple board that gives impetus to all this "me too" gNonsense) and if it goes any further down that rat hole, it'll turn the same pear shape all the greedy eventually assume.

(The difference between the clever and the wise:
The clever know how to get out of situations which
the wise wouldn't have gotten into in the first place.)

"The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux nation"

Richard Parsons, Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive (Referring to the Civil War American general George Custer who was defeated by Native Americans in a battle dubbed "Custer's Last Stand.")

"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

Jack Valenti, President, Motion Picture Association Of America, Inc. (in 1982 in testimony to the House of Representatives)

Incumbents are never wrong.

An Auckland man was left partially blind because of an infection as a result of wearing a pair of coloured contact lenses for several days.

President of the Cornea and Contact Lens Society Dr Trevor Gray says the industry needs to be more controlled to prevent similar tragedies.

One option is to make all contact lenses prescription only.

While in no way minimising the tragedy of the loss, nor impugning the motivation of Doctor Gray, I think this might not have been the best example to use as a media lever for greater regulation.

The victim borrowed the novelty contact lenses from a friend. How would the legislation proposed by opthamolgists influence that? It wouldn't, it wouldn't have as much effect as the now well publicised risks will have. And I doubt there'll be any water drinking contests run as a result of the "Hold Your Wee For A Wii" in the US.

Even regulation would not prevent further occurrences, many things occur even when there is regulation and information in abundance.

We don't need regulation and experts forced on us, it is probably sufficient to publicise the problem, and its regrettable that the publicity only arises from our media, and/or that we pay attention, when there is a tragedy.

In response to a Telecom marketing initiative linking broadband to education, Steve Biddle at Geekzone expressed some reasonable concern about kids relying on the Interweb as a source of credible information.

I'd go further and be concerned if anyone was using any single source of information for any purpose.

Teachers, text-books (Feynman's experience), parents, poets, priests, politicians, the books in the library, newspapers, TV news; all suffer from weaknesses, biases and plain inaccuracy.

There's no perfect source and trying to identify it is not the skill that's needed. Discrimination is whats required, to learn to discern at best the probable accuracy taking into account source and a whole lot more.

So I agree, kids shouldn't rely on the Interweb, or anything else in isolation.

"Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow" also works in reverse.

This multi-source approach is acknowleged in the press release:

“The great thing about using broadband is that you can do so in conjunction with other excellent learning resources such as library and text books” — Telecom GM of Consumer Marketing Kevin Bowler.

The line I heard and like about Wikipedia is that it might be the first place you go, but should never be the last.

And if schoolkids using it for homework is a concern, how about the American mid-term elections?