(1) conflates services and infrastructure, which is sloppy / oversimplified.
Google mostly gets from 1 to 5 by getting folks to use its services, not via its infrastructure directly. The infrastructure is primarily there to ensure that folks use the net more overall (and by extension, its services.)
That's not necessarily a bad thing: in return for a service you want to use, you're being shown ads targeted at you. To ensure you consume those services, they're made easy to access.
I wouldn't be too surprised if Google analyzed their traffic and discovered that a lot of people were getting frustrated while logged into Google properties due to slow, crappy connections in Starbuckses, and decided to solve that problem once and for all.
Starbucks is, from Google's perspective, a major ISP with somewhat poor service that's very concentrated geographically. That last part means it's very cheap to just swoop in and spend the money to solve the problem definitively.
I have no idea if this is actually the case, but it wouldn't surprise me if Google has decided that they're losing $BIGNUM from bad connections at Starbucks, and that it'll only cost $BIGNUM/2 to solve it with brute force.
> Google mostly gets from 1 to 5 by getting folks to use its services, not via its infrastructure directly.
That may be the case mainly in the past. But with technology evolving, I do think it's tempting to go further and extract valuable data from network traffic as well, which in turn can be used to create an even more precise picture of the user.
Perhaps. But that's speculation about the future, which needs to be separated from the current facts. Don't blame people for things they haven't done yet.
Google mostly gets from 1 to 5 by getting folks to use its services, not via its infrastructure directly. The infrastructure is primarily there to ensure that folks use the net more overall (and by extension, its services.)
That's not necessarily a bad thing: in return for a service you want to use, you're being shown ads targeted at you. To ensure you consume those services, they're made easy to access.