Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

So Google doesn't even have enough patience to grow a fiber internet business, but it has the patience to build a whole city and then support it for decades?

What happens 5 years later after all the people have moved into it, but Google discovers that the project is not very profitable for them to maintain or that they can't achieve whatever objectives they were hoping to achieve with it?

I'm guessing the #1 objective with this is to create a "role model" for a total surveillance panopticon type of city that governments around the world would then replicate, using its technologies.

I'm also assuming this city would also get "upgrade" to having "always-on" wireless brain scanning technology in the future, so that the company can "better target" ads at you in every moment of your life.

So Google doesn't even have enough patience to grow a fiber internet business, but it has the patience to build a whole city and then support it for decades?

That's a real problem with Google. They lack follow-through outside their core business area. Their ISP projects, both fiber and wireless, ended after a few prototype neighborhood installations. Their robotics projects went nowhere. They bought Motorola and trashed it. City infrastructure has to be maintained for centuries. Google lacks that capability.

Torontonian here. I understand your concern, but my opinion is that its a worthwhile (contained) experiment in a space (urbanism) that could use some new information about approaches that work and don't work.

In the hypothetical case you describe where Google decides to drop it - a case I find unlikely to be done as suddenly as you proposed if for nothing else but bad publicity - I could see the neighbourhood becoming a normal neighbourhood of Toronto with perhaps a cool extra things added. Currently it's essentially a dead industrial land in a great location that has been underused for too long, so the opportunity cost does not seem so high.

They raise prices.

They start selling the data (oh wait it's google, just terrifying services based on their data).

The abandon large amounts of costly hard to maintain infrastructure and the city crashes.

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