Every time Google does something that is not search related it creates waves.
In this case, it is about an infrastructure project aimed to lay communication cables under the pacific ocean. Does that mean that they will get into the communication business? I doubt that. Instead, we should look at their mission statement --Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Given that, it is sometimes necessary to have control over the infrastructure to provide good quality service to the segments that they consider important. Typically, partners in the ecosystem own the complementary assets and companies just make use of them to provide their services. Google and Apple are using a different approach by owning/controlling these complementary assets.