Google’s head of special initiatives, Chris Sacca, recently took the time to outline some of the company’s intentions with the FCC auction.  In an interview with CNET, he paints a picture of an institution appalled by the “reprehensible” lack of open access to all the riches of the internet.

“We have fought hard on a number of fronts to make the Internet as available as possible to the largest number of people as possible. Right now, the Internet is not available in too many places. And it’s still too expensive for most folks”

If you suspend the usual cynicism forcefields (a difficult task when you’re as tech-jaded as I am), Sacca paints an endearing picture of Google as both “the little guys who dream” and as a massive enabler for real industry change.  He also clears up a few well-quoted confusions, not least Google’s intent should their demands for network openness not be sated:

“What we said was that there had been some concerns that somehow imposing these openness principles on the spectrum might diminish its value at auction. And we wanted to reassure the FCC that embracing a path of full openness in the interest of users and the interest of consumers would not reduce the total revenue of the auction”

There’s a heavy scepticism for AT&T and Verizon and their willingness to accept FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s halfway house of openness measures, together with some neat soundbite-friendly support for niche third-parties who might benefit from a Google landlord:

“Google is willing to do anything necessary to introduce some competition into this space and to really drive the prices of service to where they are most affordable to the broadest number of people. It is reprehensible that there are still so many people left off the Net.

That entails everything from building and operating a network, if necessary, to partnering with the vast number of companies left out of this game–for whom $5 billion is an insurmountable hurdle to participate meaningfully in an auction that could introduce true competition–to any of the existing carriers, if they want to put users first in their business models and prioritize those customer experiences”

If I may be allowed one brief moment of cynicism, it should be obvious to everybody that Google is not doing this solely for the good of mankind; at the end of the day, they’ll be making money from advertising, content brokering and more.  What it does tell us, though, is that we may not see one, branded Google Phone, but instead a number of handsets all capable of using some or all of their suite of applications.  Whether their competitors can allow that to happen - or survive if it does - remains to be seen.