I think this is a consistent problem that tech’s going to run into as its direction continues being driven by venture capital: Venture capitalists are looking for low-cost, high-margin moonshots that can translate into big paydays. Often, this stuff is reliant on stable infrastructure: Uber and Lyft require roads, reliable phone signals, and relatively compact cities in order to work optimally, Amazon doesn’t get off the ground without the postal service, and every search engine and social network ever made depends on the ubiquity of the internet. Using this existing infrastructure, tech companies can offer services that potentially make their investors a lot of money.
When it comes to creating infrastructure, though, Silicon Valley has less of a stomach for that. ISPs are reliable money-makers, but creating a network is a slow, expensive, regulation-filled process, and the margins are low, especially since you’re competing with an oligopoly in a market with huge economies of scale. Worse, you can’t put much marketing spin on how it will “change lives” or “disrupt the market” — Google Fiber was able to for a while with its talk of fiber-optic cables, but now that the market’s catching up, it’s fairly obvious that Alphabet’s just building a cable company.
The weird thing is, Alphabet is publicly traded, so it’s not reliant on VCs, and a cable company would be a good thing for Alphabet to build! It would cost a lot initially, but they’ve got the money, and over time it would become a steady earner, providing the sort of long-term security that Google’s ads are supposed to offer (but probably won’t). But that’s just not Alphabet’s way of doing business, to spend money on digging equipment and city permits and construction crews and lawyers who can work with local governments: better to put the money into 1000 smaller projects that each have a 1% chance of succeeding off the back of existing infrastructure. They’d rather keep trying for moonshots than build a space elevator.