Google is offering to build ultra-maximum-high-speed Internet for cities in need, and a few Minnesota cities are clamoring to be included. It's called "Google Fiber," which sounds like something people tell you to do when you have digestive issues.

How fast is Google Fiber? When you download a movie, it's over before you start watching it. When you download a song, you're sick of it already. When you make a plane reservation using Google Fiber, you will arrive at the gate 47 minutes earlier. Web pages load so quickly that they actually knock your monitor over, and when you put it back up, the people in the pictures have black eyes from hitting the inside of the screen. I have high-speed so fast it makes the dog's hair fall out when I turn it on, but Google Fiber is apparently so fast you get windburn after 10 minutes on the Web.

More than a thousand towns are clawing over each other to get it. Duluth wants it, as does Austin; here in the metro, Falcon Heights and North St. Paul are waving their hands shouting, CHOOSE ME. So how do you get Google's attention? Every town's making a YouTube video with a notable publicity stunt. Duluth offered to name its children Google -- preferable to "Yahoo," but still creepy. If you're going to use YouTube, have a guy in an ice fishing house receiving the Internet's binary code by Morse code. OK, one, zero, zero, one, one, one, zero -- slow down, I'm getting a cramp in my modem hand -- zero, one. Or film some "Rite of Spring" type ceremony where the clan elders sacrifice a virgin to the Elder Gods of Google, hoping for faster connection speeds. Tagline: If we'd do this for broadband, imagine what we'd do if you tossed in cellular.

If you're Austin, home of Hormel, say something about how the guys who handle tons of e-mail shouldn't mess with the people who invented Spam.

But no. The videos are mostly happy shiny PR efforts about what great towns they are, and of course they're all that and a bag of microchips. But if you can use the Internet to tell Google you want them, you're going to lose out to people who send a letter stating they would like the Internet please, because right now their grandma in the Cities has to print it off every day and mail it, and she's, you know, getting up there.

Question: Do you really want Google handling your precious traffic? Look, there's something unnerving about Google's happy desire to do everything and know everything. Google gave me a phone number, for example. Here! Talk all you want! It's on the house. A while ago I discovered they'd digitized vast numbers of newspapers going back to the 19th century, and they're searchable. "Oh, just something we did when we had a spare afternoon. It's free. Enjoy! Oh, and we scanned all the books in the world, too. Free! Have fun! Oh, and we used our time machine and memory-engram reader to download all the thoughts you had between the ages of 2 and 10; want to sign up for the beta? Cool! Oh, it's free. Plus, here's a car. It uses paper money as fuel, but we'll cover that. It's free! All we ask is that you look at this ad that warns you not to pay for white teeth. Nah, you don't have to click. Just look at it. We can tell if you're looking at it, so it counts."

I swear this will be the fine print: Google Fiber reserves the right to use all your data to help create a database that will enable us to reproduce your entire town, including its occupants, on a duplicate planet we have constructed on the other side of the sun. Privacy advocates will cry foul; Google evangelists will note that the other planet will be a necessary backup should Earth have a system failure. And the fine folk of Falcon Heights will get used to it.

Or Google Heights, as it will be called. We won't know how that happened. Someone will do a search for "Falcon Heights," and the page will say, "Did you mean Google Heights?" You'll get a blank look on your face, a glassy stare. Yes, you think. I guess I did.

jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 More daily at www.startribune.com/blogs/lileks