The Google Guys (23 page)

Google still wants to see more WiFi across the world. It funded and helped launch a company called Meraki Networks, which makes wireless transceivers that people can buy not only to create a wireless connection for themselves, but also to offer their WiFi connections to others. Some do it for free, but others can charge for the access, using an online billing system provided and run by Meraki. The system is gaining popularity in San Francisco.

But Google never saw this as a new business opportunity. It was mainly interested in the catalyst role—getting local municipalities to start thinking about the possibilities. “The goal wasn't to build WiFi in every town,” says Sacca. “Just one or two. Hopefully, cut them some air, act as a catalyst.” And this did happen. Many cities started installing municipal WiFi systems, including Philadelphia, New Orleans, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, Portland, and Boston. In many of these cities, existing ISPs sued to keep it from happening. After Verizon Communications and other ISPs lobbied the Pennsylvania state legislature, it passed a law forbidding any city in that state to build any WiFi network without giving the private sector first crack at it.

The idea of free WiFi as proposed by Google is now effectively dead. It's been hard for companies to create an effective advertising model that would support free WiFi. If anybody could have done so, it would have been Google, but the company says it's through with experimenting with the concept. Earthlink, one of the companies trying to make a business out of municipal WiFi, is facing financial troubles and has decided to get out of the municipal WiFi business. As a result, Philadelphia is shutting down its Earthlink-based WiFi system, and others are following that lead.

Perhaps it was a bad idea to begin with. The old WiFi technology that's been used so far was inadequate, since the signals cannot pass through walls or other obstructions in cities. Craig Settles, a municipal WiFi consultant at
Successful.com
, believes Google did a disservice to the concept by leading cities to believe they could get WiFi for free. In retrospect, Sacca believes he offered too much up front. He should have first offered to install the system for a few million dollars, then negotiated down. Mayor Gavin Newsom believes that everything fell apart because the city didn't simply jump on Google's offer immediately and instead let too many other companies get involved. “If we had just worked with Google, it would have happened,” he says.

Google is getting better at the political game, and it still has a chance to make change happen. There are new alternatives on the rise. One is the “white space” between broadcast TV channel frequencies—buffer zones created to keep one channel's signal from interfering with the one next to it. As broadcast TV goes digital, the FCC has decided to open up the frequencies for other uses, including WiFi. These signals can pass through walls. It was controversial, with broadcasters and entertainers lobbying against it, saying there would still be interference, and Google and others lobbying for it. This was one of Larry's pet projects. After testing, the FCC has decided that interference won't be a problem, and it approved its use. Larry couldn't help getting in a dig at his opponents in a posting on the company's blog: “As an engineer, I was also really gratified to see that the FCC decided to put science over politics,” he wrote. “For years the broadcasting lobby and others have tried to spread fear and confusion about this technology, rather than allow the FCC's engineers to simply do their work.”

Another is a proposal by the FCC to auction off a 25-MHz swath of spectrum in the 2,155-MHz band, with the requirement that the winning bidder use some of it to offer free WiFi across the country. Even Settles believes this proposal could work.

Google has not given any indication of how it might participate in these new proposals. But given its vested interest in getting more people online cheaply and without restrictions, it's highly likely that it will participate in some way. The moves and lobbying Google has already done “will ultimately lead to more Internet access,” says Sacca. And, as he notes, “Google has staggeringly high resources to be applied to the world's biggest problems.”

Google may yet look more like a telecommunications company in the future. And, once again, people will scratch their heads and wonder why Larry and Sergey wanted to get involved in something so far removed from the search business.

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

 

 

L
arry and Sergey took three years to find someone they trusted to guide their philanthropic organization, Google .org. The wait was worth it. Once again, it's hard to imagine that they could have found a better person for the job.

Dr. Larry Brilliant is the quintessential Baby Boomer. Born in 1944, he has an M.D. and is a specialist in preventive medicine and public health. He attended Woodstock, the Burning Man festival of its day, and studied under a yogi in India, who encouraged him to start a mission to banish smallpox in that country—which he did, working with the World Health Organization. For a while, back in Northern California, he was Jerry Garcia's personal physician.

Brilliant says he struggles with the typical Baby Boomer's restless ambition, but at least he puts it to good use. He's founder and director of the Seva Foundation, which works to eliminate preventable and curable blindness in countries around the world. He has worked with the Centers for Disease Control on a smallpox bioterrorism response effort. Following up on his role presiding over the last natural case of smallpox in the world, he later worked on a campaign to eliminate polio in developing countries. Most recently, he volunteered in Sri Lanka for tsunami relief. In February 2006 he received a $100,000 TED Prize (part of the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference) for his wish to build a global early warning system that can detect new pandemics or disasters before they get out of control.

Brilliant also has an eclectic background as an executive and board member. He was cofounder of The Well, the first online virtual community in the 1970s. He was also CEO of the broadband company SoftNet Systems Inc. and holds a telecommunications technology patent. Today he serves as a member of the strategic advisory committee for the venture capital firm KPCB, and sits on the boards of the Skoll Foundation, Health Metrics Network, Omidyar Network, Humanity United, and InSTEDD, an organization applying technological tools to improve disaster response.

He says he first heard about Google's philanthropic arm, then called the Google Foundation, when he was laid up in a refugee camp in Sri Lanka with typhoid fever. “I was mildly delirious, and in order to stay conscious I forced myself to translate every Hindi newspaper I could get, because it was hard, and otherwise I would pass out with typhoid.” In one article, he read about the Google Foundation. It included an e-mail address that people interested in a job with the organization could write to. So he sent the e-mail and asked to learn more about the foundation. He never got a response. But, he says, he may have gotten the e-mail address wrong. “The article was all in Hindi, so I'm not even sure if my e-mail got through.”

But when he returned to the United States, Larry and Sergey found him. It started at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), an organization run by the private, nonprofit Sapling Foundation. Its annual conference attracts luminaries on a par with the World Economic Forum. In March 2006, some TED members encouraged Brilliant to give some talks and meet with people at companies that were part of TED, in order to get some support for his wish. He gave a talk in Woodside, a tony Silicon Valley town populated by venture capitalists and wealthy executives, about his TED wish and his work eradicating smallpox. Unbeknownst to him, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt were in the back of the room. One of them turned to the other and said, “Let's hire him.” Brilliant is not sure which one.

He then ran into a Google executive who told him, “We were just talking about you as a candidate to run
Google.org
. We've been looking for somebody for several years, we've interviewed thousands of people, and we can't find the right person.” Brilliant says he wasn't interested at first. He hadn't reported to a boss for about forty years, and didn't want to. But at a dinner at Google board member John Doerr's house, Doerr emphasized that it was an extraordinary opportunity. Brilliant says Doerr told him, “You've got to go meet with Larry and Sergey. Just go in, close the door, spend the day with them, and see if you don't think they're the most wonderful people in the world.” He did, and they were. Brilliant has become one of the pair's biggest fans. In February 2006 he became executive director of
Google.org
. (In early 2009, he turned over control of
Google.org
to another executive and became Google's “chief philanthropy evangelist,” more of a lobbyist, organizer, and promoter of Google's philanthropic ideas.)

Google.org
is endowed with three million shares of Google stock, worth over $1 billion. That pales in comparison to one of the biggest private philanthropies, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, of which Bill Gates himself is now co-chair. That foundation was created in 1994 with an endowment of $94 million. But Gates, who just recently started focusing most of his efforts there, has expanded it to over $35 billion. It does extraordinary work in health and education issues, much of it in the developing world. Gates's mother was a prominent philanthropist with United Way, and he had set an agenda for himself when he was very young: make a fortune as an entrepreneur first, then become a philanthropist. He was true to his word.

The difference with Larry and Sergey, says Brilliant, is that they're dedicated to making Google the core of philanthropic work at such a young age. “When you're older and you've lost somebody, when you've been touched with mortality, had a birth or a near death, seen the futility of material things, you will wax philosophic about the meaning of life and duty and making the morally right decisions,” says Brilliant. “But in young people, my experience has been that that's rare. That's what was so impressive about Larry and Sergey. I was double their age and they had thought more deeply about some of the moral issues of technology and business than I had.”

Brilliant has had a strong influence on the organization. Larry and Sergey were deeply interested in his background dealing with disease. After three weeks on the job, Larry came to his office and said they should think about health. They spent a year going through thousands of different proposals that had been submitted to them, from dealing with water crises to the disparity between rich and poor, to women's genital mutilation in certain countries, to HIV/AIDS.

Notably, Brilliant made his TED wish part of
Google.org
. One of its initiatives is development of a program to use the power of information technology to create a proactive system that can predict and help prevent infectious diseases, rather than just reacting to them once they've spread. The organization studies factors that spread disease, such as climate change, deforestation, rising international travel, and human contact with animals. It focuses on developing countries, and tracks diseases and natural disasters.

Another initiative of which Brilliant is extremely proud is called “Inform and Empower.” Again focused on developing countries, it has as its mission to inform the populations of developing countries of services available to them from their own governments. Too frequently people don't even know what programs they might be able to tap, and the program is designed to empower them to demand those services, ranging from education to improving water quality to finding a doctor. Sometimes the governments themselves are not aware that the services they're paying for are not actually being provided. That program also funds nonprofit NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) to act as scorekeepers to track who's getting schools or physicians in their area.

Brilliant says this program can even empower the governments to provide new services. “Some countries are post-Soviet, and many countries in Africa are post-conflict, and these are not necessarily governments that have a long tradition of delivering complex services to huge numbers of people. So we can help, with tools, with computer systems, and then we can help empower communities to know which of these things are important. That's a really great initiative with Google's core principles,” he says.

But Larry and Sergey are still the go-to people for approval. They like to analyze the programs and look for practical ways to implement them and measure progress. When Brilliant presented the proposal for the Inform and Empower program to Larry and Sergey, he came armed with several objectives: to improve the ability of governments to render service, to improve the ability of people to find out about those services, and to get a scorekeeper. Larry and Sergey discussed this, and pointed out that the important issue isn't whether the government or an NGO is keeping score; the important thing is the result. So they said each program should also set a goal—that 80 percent of the people affected should know the quality of the water they drink, the quality of education their kids get, and the quality of the health care they receive. “Their thinking went immediately above the tactics to the results,” says Brilliant. “That's the way they think. They go to the highest level and they externalize it.”

Brilliant, who is better read than most journalists interviewing him, compares Larry and Sergey's thinking to that of Immanuel Kant when he wrote philosophical arguments about what actions constituted the greatest good in the world. Kant described the “categorical imperative,” which suggests choosing the good work you do by asking yourself, “What if everybody got this good thing?” Says Brilliant, “The idea is to look to the universality of the good. That's the way Larry and Sergey think. Their minds are in a different paradigm.”