Google certainly benefited a ton from all the 'dark fiber' and the glut of bandwidth after the crash. Probably didn't make much of a long-term difference becaus

Google certainly benefited a ton from all the 'dark fiber' and the glut of bandwidth after the crash. Probably didn't make much of a long-term difference because it didn't solve the last-mile problem to consumers. ('We now have free terabyte/s bandwidth in between our datacenters!' 'Great. But all our customers are still connecting over 1mb/s DSLs. What do we do with it all?') And other countries which didn't build out so much have still done well in getting Internet connectivity done.