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.)