Google Can Ditch Kansas City After Two Years → Re: WOW! Just another Google Beta pgm - no support; walk away

And that's it.
Google itself was an experiment, and has run hundreds of these employee inspired alpha , beta and dozens of outside tests, about 1 in 6 moves on, at least for a while.
They certainly can afford to invest in some internet service provider research which will no doubt net the most interesting and valuable thing on earth...Information.

whether this continues on or they dump it in a couple years the will learn something from it (and we can guess) but it's pretty early for pundits to start stamping it sucess or failure, or declaring it a model for all future providers/networks.