There's always been a touch of Willy Wonka style unreality about Google Fiber.<p>Municipalities across the U.S. know that their broadband sucks, and they wrote proposals to Google in lieu of real action, hoping Google could solve their problems with their magic wand.<p>Google still has a "non-evil" and academic reputation in some quarters, although anybody who makes a living on the streets of the internet knows that Google is the most dangerous and rapacious company on the net. People think, for instance, that Google is a noble warrior against web spam, although Google sustains web spam by (i) being the only signficant source of traffic for many site types, and (ii) making it possible to monetize crappy content. In fact, Google has gained "question answering" capabilities in the last few years thanks to web spam farms run by companies like eHow.<p>What gets me is that, in a time where the world is overflowing with capital (signified by low interest rates and general low investment returns) both the private and public sectors in the U.S. seem completely indifferent to investments in infrastructure.<p>(And why should they? Telecom companies can make minimal investments in infrastructure and charge champagne prices for beer products.)<p>Google steps in because, like Microsoft, they've got a small number of wildly profitable products and an inability to use the profits from those products to create new products of comparable profitability.<p>This is good for Kansas City, but it's one of just a long list of distractions, such as snake oil fixed wireless schemes for rural access, that have stood in the way of a real national plan for broadband U.S.