{"id":381072,"date":"2010-03-02T11:44:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-02T16:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100301\/1824288348.shtml"},"modified":"2010-03-02T11:44:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-02T16:44:00","slug":"topeka-sorta-changes-its-name-to-google-in-blatant-suck-up-for-fiber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/381072","title":{"rendered":"Topeka (Sorta) Changes Its Name To Google, In Blatant Suck Up For Fiber"},"content":{"rendered":"

With Google’s announcement<\/a> that it plans to roll out super fast fiber to the home services in a few small locations, there are plenty of cities and towns hoping to be among the lucky few. But who knew it was a contest? Apparently the folks in Topeka, Kansas think that sucking up to the big G is the path to fiber optic nirvana. They’ve proclaimed that, for the month of March, Topeka shall be referred to as Google, Kansas<\/a>. It’s not a legal name change — which (not surprisingly) would be a lot more complex, and likely wouldn’t pass — but just a proclamation that the city should be called Google for the month.<\/p>\n

Of course, cities renaming themselves after tech companies isn’t all that new. Over a decade ago, some town in Oregon renamed itself Half.com<\/a> in a PR stunt by the startup (which was later bought by eBay). And, a few years ago, a small town in Texas renamed itself Dish, Texas<\/a> after EchoStar’s Dish Network, in exchange for every house in the town getting a free DVR and free satellite TV for 10 years. But this is the first time I’ve heard of a city pre-emptively (sorta) renaming itself to curry favor with a company.<\/p>\n

But, if it works… I’m more than willing to rename my house Chez Google, if it means 1 gigabit per second fiber. Hell, I’m pretty sure I could convince all of the neighbors on my street to rename our street Google Ave. Just let us know…<\/p>\n

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With Google’s announcement that it plans to roll out super fast fiber to the home services in a few small locations, there are plenty of cities and towns hoping to be among the lucky few. But who knew it was a contest? Apparently the folks in Topeka, Kansas think that sucking up to the big […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-381072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}