Google in Baltimore? Why not?

Posted: 4:48 pm Thu, March 18, 2010
By Daily Record Staff

And so, Baltimore has joined what some have called the “Google-pandering arms race” in an effort to land a high-speed broadband network worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Why not?

As long as Baltimore stops short of some of the shenanigans to which other cities have stooped, such as Topeka, Kan., renaming itself “Google” for the month of March, this is a perfect opportunity for the city’s public and private sectors to collaborate in a campaign that both stresses the local resources and support for the network while also making the case for why the network is so badly needed here.

“It’s almost like we’re competing for the Olympics,” Joseph Weaver, CEO of Global Design Interactive, an Owings Mills marketing firm, told this newspaper last week. “There’s the same kind of momentum and flow.”

Deputy Mayor Andrew B. Frank made a similar observation in an interview in the current issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “I’ve been here for 15 years, and I’ve never seen this kind of grassroots support come together so quickly,” he said.

Google said last month that it is looking for a place to launch a broadband network connecting 50,000 to 500,000 people directly to the Internet on fiber-optic cables more than 100 times faster than the Web access enjoyed by most Americans. Google is accepting applications until March 26.

A grassroots effort has already begun in Baltimore, including a Facebook page called Bmore Fiber! that has attracted about 4,000 fans.  City and state officials, including Gov. Martin O’Malley, have posted testimonials on YouTube.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake jumped on the bandwagon last week, naming Tom Loveland, CEO of Mind Over Machines, as the city’s “Google czar” and enlisting support from business executives and organizations. Under Armour has agreed to provide marketing expertise.

That expertise will be sorely needed because, as The Daily Record’s Managing Editor/Online Robert J. Terry pointed out in last week’s article, Baltimore has a very fine line to walk between emphasizing its resources to help support such a network — world-class medical institutions and leading information-intensive research labs such as the Space Telescope Science Institute — while also emphasizing its need for this technology and how the network could be used as an engine to drive social change, entrepreneurship and innovation.

We support and applaud the efforts to nab a Google network for Baltimore, and we hope those efforts succeed.

But most of all, we support and applaud the collaboration between the public and private sectors and the recognition of the importance of technology to the region that has emerged as a result. That alone is worth celebrating.