Google's Spectrum Play Hubris?

There have been rumours about Google getting involved in the wireless wars in the U.S. for some time now, and the company itself has admitted many times that it is interested in expanding the number of people who use the mobile Web and in increasing the amount of competition there is in the mobile business.

So it’s not hard to believe comes up with a figure of $8-billion or so. Of course, that’s only a couple of years worth of cash flow, right? Google should be able to make that up in a few months of selling click-to-call ads on your mobile phone, or whatever the heck it is planning to do. But still — why does Google have to do this at all? Is the U.S. mobile market so broken that only Google can fix it? I hate to make reference to myself (okay, who’s kidding who — I love it) but I wrote a post recently in which I wondered whether people weren’t putting