Google's new Pixel smartphone and America's looming internet revolution

Google's new Pixel smartphone may seem like a straightforward competitor to Apple's iPhone. But it's not that simple.

For one thing, Pixel users will have unlimited access to upload pictures and videos to cloud storage on the internet. Pixel also boasts a suite of accompanying devices: a WiFi router, a video streaming device, and even Google Home, which can do everything from schedule your meetings and edit your calendar to adjusting your lights and thermostat. These Google devices all communicate with one another through the cloud, taking voice commands, and relying on Pixel's built-in AI interface.

This is some whiz-bang cool gadgetry. But it's something else, too. It's close to the culmination of the process by which new technology ceases to be new technology, or even cool technology, and becomes accepted as just a fact of life. It's a step toward the day when internet access and associated services like cloud computing become de facto public goods.

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I don't mean "public goods" in the same way economists refer to "natural monopolies," like roads or water pipes, which are typically systems in which building two sets of roads or pipes to serve the same community would be all but impossible. I mean "public goods" in a broader sense. Think of electricity or police — things that are so ubiquitous that they form part of the all-encompassing fabric of economic and social life. These are things competing companies can provide to the same community. But in many cases, it's easier to have one monopoly provider do it. That's why government runs the police force and the electrical grid (or farms out the grid to private utilities that have to be so heavily regulated they're effectively government adjuncts).

The internet and cloud computing will one day be just this sort of public good. They will become ubiquitous enough that we just start assuming everyone has them — just like you assume basically everyone has electricity — and start organizing our economic lives around that assumption.

We're still not there yet. But internet usage is at 89 percent in America, and at 80 percent and 84 percent for people with less education and less income, respectively. Smartphone ownership is at 72 percent nationally, at 52 percent for households making under $30,000, and at 41 percent for people without a college degree. (The poorer you are, the more likely you are to access the internet only through a mobile device.)

Access to the internet is dramatically reshaping our work lives, too, and what employers can reasonably expect from employees. By mid-2015, the portion of U.S. workers who telecommute was at 37 percent — up from just 9 percent in 1995. And most remote workers seem okay with the idea of staying connected to the job via the internet, even after normal business hours are over.

We're approaching the day when employers can just assume that everyone who works for them, or that they might hire, has either home WiFi or regular access to the internet. Or assume that workers can easily dump whatever schematic or data table or list they're working on into the cloud, wherever they are and whenever needed. This is the world prefaced by Google's new Pixel, and all the other gizmos that come along with Google's renewed effort to provide a suite of cloud computing services that stretch across both work and leisure.

So what happens when our economy and workplaces truly reorganize around the internet and the cloud?

Maybe the government will give everyone cash grants or tax subsidies so they can buy into the private services that bring us WiFi and mobile internet access and cloud storage and smartphones. Or the government could step in and build an internet infrastructure itself, or provide a public option for cloud storage. If we don't, we could wind up with the situation we now face when it comes to transportation, where poorer Americans are geographically stranded from good jobs because they can't afford the private forms of transit (cars) and the government isn't doing a good job maintaining the public forms (buses, subways, etc).

Today, it's just Google Home and you telling your Pixel smartphone to crank the AC down a notch. But someday soon, we may face some very interesting questions about just who Americans should rely on to provide their internet service, their WiFi, their cloud computing and even their smartphones. It might not be the answer we expect.