Maybe I should call myself Rich “Chicago Bull” — I always wanted to play shooting guard next to Derrick Rose. That seems to be the strategy of Topeka, Kansas, which in a blatant cry for attention — and broadband funds — has announced it will change its name to Google for the month of March.
Now the name change isn’t a legal name change, but more of a city proclamation — but that doesn’t make it any less attention-grabbing.
As we wrote yesterday, cities are falling all over themselves to submit RFIs and try to grab some of the promised “hundreds of millions of dollars” that Google is apparently ready to commit to helping build local fiber networks.
The local paper documented Topeka’s unconventional efforts:
Topeka Mayor Bill Bunten…told city council members about the proclamation prior to a special meeting of the council held at noon at City Hall to hear the first reading of a proposal that wasn’t linked to local efforts to convince Google to make Topeka a test site for an ultrafast Internet connection.
Bunten asked the seven council members on hand if they had a problem with his issuing the proclamation, which also encourages Topekans to recognize and support continuing efforts to bring Google’s fiber optics experiment here. None objected.
“I support pushing the ’send’ button,” Councilman Jeff Preisner said.
With the government broadband stimulus program inching along, Google has certainly accomplished its goal of garnering attention for itself — and the issue of local broadband.
Which would make me all the more willing to ask my own town to slap on a shiny new name — if I probably already hadn’t ticked off Google with my skepticism about their efforts : >
