There was another issue to be addressed with mobile phones: spectrum space. All radio frequencies-whether for cell phone calls, broadcast television or radio signals, or other wireless devices-travel over spectrum space that is assigned and regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. Google lobbied to ensure that the new wireless space would be open and not controlled by just a few telephone giants. Ivan Seidenberg, the CEO of Verizon, disputed Google’s contention that his was a closed system: “Since we think we have the most reliable network, we’ll publish standards and let people connect to any device they want to.” The FCC sided with Google, and in July 2007 ruled that the telephone companies could not control what applications were used on this new spectrum. Soon after the FCC announcement, Google raised the stakes by threatening to bid in the January 2008 spectrum auction, establishing itself as a telephone company.
Google had no intention of providing telephone service or producing hardware for a Google phone. They would not say this publicly, however, because by fanning speculation-and the speculation was incendiary-they kept people guessing and increased their leverage over the wireless telephone companies. They also brought themselves closer to achieving three objectives: to make Google programs, including such new features as voice search, work on wireless devices; to reduce the cost of mobile phone service and Internet connections by allowing advertisers to subsidize them; and to extend to mobile devices the company’s dominance in online advertising. Google believes that ads on mobile devices could fetch premium prices. With GPS positioning married to Google’s immense database, an advertiser could know who purchased cashmere sweaters or golf clubs and if a consumer was outside a store that had a special sale on, an alert could appear on the mobile screen informing her. Because this would be what advertisers and Google excitedly describe as “a service” or “information” rather than a traditional ad, the hope was that consumers wouldn’t be annoyed by these intrusions. In November 2007, Google announced that it was working with thirty-three corporate partners, including T-Mobile, Samsung, Intel, and eBay, to launch Android as a free operating system.
In the auction, few companies could match the financial bids made by the giant telephone companies. Google could, though, and to enter the mobile phone business and ensure that Android would work seamlessly, they needed to. But Google didn’t want to become a telephone company. So it made a let‘s-hope-we-lose floor bid of $4.6 billion for a block of wireless spectrum, conditioned on the FCC’s agreement to guarantee that the winner of the auction open its hardware and services to third parties.
Of course, Google’s mobile phone ambitions would collide with powerful telephone companies and with Nokia, the world’s number one mobile phone manufacturer. They were allied in fear that their business model was under assault. They worried that their dominance would be diminished. Who would receive the advertising revenues? Who would claim ownership of the valuable data generated? Would their own hardware be cloned, like PCs? “Now that they want to dominate the planet on phone calls,” Seidenberg said of Google, “they’ve provoked the bear.”
Neither Seidenberg nor representatives from AT amp;T or Nokia joined in Google’s November announcement of the first truly open mobile operating system. A traditional Google corporate ally, Steve Jobs, also did not join because Apple’s iPhone provides a mobile operating system, one less open than Google’s. This was a little clumsy, because half of Apple’s eight directors serve as Google directors or advisers, among them Eric Schmidt, Bill Campbell, and Al Gore. At Apple board meetings, Schmidt told me he now recused himself from mobile phone discussions.
In the auction, that commenced in January, all bidders were instructed not to reveal their bids. When it was over, Verizon and AT amp;T had won, paying a total of $16.2 billion for two wide swatches of spectrum. In an April “all hands” meeting with Google employees, either attending or on a video hookup, Schmidt confessed, “We had the very good fortune of entering the spectrum auction for $4.6 billion, and not winning. We sweated it out!” Both Verizon and AT amp;T would pledge to open their networks. AT amp;T announced that it would sell phones with Google’s Android system, and Verizon announced that it was open to consider any Android prototype. (By the summer of 2009, Verizon had yet to submit an Android application; nor had any phone company, save T-Mobile.) One former federal official was cynical about what he called Google’s “fake bid.” He believed Google had a sweetheart deal with Verizon, that the telephone company knew all along Google would not make escalating bids and that all Google really wanted was assurance that Verizon would open its system to Android. He was dubious that Verizon’s system would be open for anyone but Google.
BY THE SPRING OF 2008, Google was buoyant. Rejecting the one-trick pony charge, Schmidt said that with mobile phones, plus search, plus its array of software products, and YouTube, he explained why it was conceivable that Google could become the first media company to generate one hundred billion dollars in revenues. He described to me “a planning process where we said, is it mathematically possible for Google to become a hundred-billion-dollar corporation? And not over any particular period of time, just, is it possible, are the markets big enough?” He estimated the annual worldwide advertising market as “somewhere between seven hundred billion and a trillion dollars. Is it possible for Google to become ten percent of that? And the answer is yes, over a long enough period of time.”
How?
“First place, you’re not going to get there with small little advertising deals. You need these big initiatives… the number one big one right in front of us is television. Big market, well monetized, easily automatable. Second one is… mobile.” The third was “enterprise,” by which he meant web-based services-“cloud computing”-offering various software applications and IT services for corporate customers, organizations, and individual consumers.
Brave words, but throughout 2008 Schmidt’s company made no money from its mobile or YouTube or cloud-computing efforts. Google did not let up. It was still talking to cable companies, Schmidt said, about partnering to target advertising for cable’s digital set-top boxes, and for Android to become the operating system for cable mobile phones-should cable decide to enter the thriving wireless market. Google joined with cable companies, Intel, and wireless providers, such as Sprint Nextel Corporation, to invest a total of $3.2 billion in WiMAX, a technology promising faster wireless connections to the Internet than those offered by Verizon and AT amp;T.
Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the CEO of Time Warner, acknowledged his company’s discussions with Google and laid out the reasons they had not yet been resolved and might not be. On the one hand, he said, unabashedly, if the cable companies could get together they would have “a Google-type ability to do targeted digital advertising.” Google, he said, “has the search data and the cookies through its searches. But the cable companies not only have that, they have everything that you do on your cable broadband connection, they’ve got everything you’ve signed on and saw. And they have everything you watched on television. And they’ve got their customer’s name and credit card information.” On the other hand, he sighed, the cable companies have a difficult time acting in concert, and the data is useful only if they aggregate it. That’s where Google has the advantage. It is willing to organize cable companies’ data, combine it with its own, and extend it to all mobile devices. Which begs another question, he said: Who owns the data, the cable company or Google? And if the cable companies let Google in the door and grant them access to its data, “you can never build an alternative because Google’s will always be that much more efficient.”