The public’s response to Google’s plans ranged from delightfully silly stunts to movingly earnest appeals. Most famously, Topeka renamed itself Google, Kansas (and Google, on April 1, honored the effort by renaming itself Topeka for a day), but the variations were rich and creative.  To help their towns compete, mayors in northern states jumped into frozen lakes while mayors in southern states jumped into shark tanks. An Oregon microbrewery produced a “Gigabit IPA” for the occasion, and citizens in Greenville, SC gathered in a park to spell out “Google” in light sticks:

Google’s YouTube became a rich repository of these appeals.  Bellingham’s vision of community was genuinely touching, while Fresno’s “I Want My Google Fiber” rap was simply awesome.

This competition for Googlish affections might be dismissed as an especially theatrical “politics of supplication,” a demeaning beg-a-thon in which the fame whores of reality TV meet the eternal desire to get something for nothing.  After all, these campaigns have little to do with policy as understood by the official regulatory apparatus.  They are trivial diversions to the “real” work done in Washington.

But what if we take these Google Fiber campaigns seriously as a kind of popular policymaking?  They reveal what people can do when asked to imagine themselves as empowered stakeholders in policy decisions. In articulating why their communities deserve the fiber, citizens were required to identify local needs and construct local civic identities, assess the impact of infrastructure options and organize coordinated responses.  In other words, they had to become policymakers.

And unlike what writers on localism often tell us, this grassroots policymaking was not restricted to local elites; the campaigns were truly popular in participation, as even the sample above begins to demonstrate.

In contrast, how should we assess the National Broadband Plan?  Instead of calling for popular policy production, the NBP was an invitation for insider political posturing.  Instead of inspiring rap videos, it inspired … comments.  Lots of comments. The Commission boasts of 23,000 comments on its public notices, 1,500 comments to its blog, etc.  And check out this inspiring statement:  “Public comment on the plan does not end here. … The public will continue to have opportunities [to comment] all along this path.”  Hoorah, more comments!

If we want Americans to think creatively about media policy in a networked society, perhaps the place to start is the difference between wonks posting blog comments and mayors swimming with sharks.  I want more of the latter.

The FCC means well, and this particular commission grasps the need for public involvement  better than previous ones.  But there’s a structural imbalance built into the process, a divide that makes decreasing sense between policymakers and the “policymade,” i.e. those citizens whose lives will be shaped by compromises devised elsewhere.  The FCC seems only able to imagine the public as Providers of Comments, all of which will be politely considered until, at the end of the day, they write the rules.  The FCC is saying, “Your call is very important to us.”  Go ahead and leave your message at the beep; in the meantime, we all know that Julius Genachowski picks up when Ivan Seidenberg rings.

What alternative roles might official policymakers imagine for the public?  Put another way, what might the politics of popular policymaking prove to be?  They must be distinct from the politics of “capture,” of officialness, and of insiderdom.  They must build on–not remain loftily above–the public’s creative energy, competitive spirit, and taste for fun. Google can provide a model here:  the FCC has to choose those first 100 million homes somehow, and if officials can re-imagine popular policymaking in the process, they might shift not just the tone but the outcomes of policy debates. After all, when the public doesn’t bother commenting, but simply acts, the official policy world gets nervous, and making powerful incumbents nervous is always in the public interest.

There’s been a lot of Buzz about what Google’s been up to in the last week or so.  But as significant as Google’s move into social networking is, a less talked-about announcement the company made last week is the real big deal: Google’s plan to build an experimental 1 Gbps, fiber-to-the-home broadband network is likely to have a big impact on Internet policy in the US, especially net neutrality and broadband stimulus.

Google’s plan has been interpreted a number of different ways but it seems pretty clear that this is really about more than just giving developers a nice sandbox to play in and some lucky folks freaking fast Internet access. Google is very active in the goings-on at the FCC right now, including leading the advocacy for putting net neutrality principles into binding regulations for ISPs and pushing for open access standards and faster speeds to be part of the National Broadband Plan.  By building this network, then, Google wants to show off to the FCC and ISPs just what an open, neutral, and really really fast network looks like.  This move is consistent with the company’s propensity toward big symbolic gestures that can be influential whether or not the stated intentions actually get followed through on: its bid on wireless spectrum in 2007 was really a stunt to encourage open access and the threats to pull out of China (detailed here on Antenna by Liz Ellcessor) have not yet been acted on.  This announcement alone has drummed up the kind of excitement that could work to raise the bar for the broadband deployment plan, which is especially crucial for bridging the digital divide with more than just access, but access that is open, neutral, and as fast as anyone in the world.