I've heard it said that one of the worst challenges at Google is that nothing moves the needle in their revenue stream other than ads. They may have tons of oth

I've heard it said that one of the worst challenges at Google is that nothing moves the needle in their revenue stream other than ads. They may have tons of other things they are up to, in huge demand everywhere, but why commit & work at anything that doesn't move the needle? Having a foot in the ISP game is a good existential hedge. It gives Google practice at doing something absolutely required for their business model to keep working. If ISPs started doing dastardly things against the dumb pipe/network neutrality model or started raising prices astronomically, Google could scale up their ISP model to keep people connected to keep the ad stream going. I do think it's a bad decision not to keep rolling out. But I think Google has a ton of difficulty maintaining sufficient caring for non-new non-shiny things, and is plagued by ads being so overwhelmingly bigger than everything else.