According to Wikipedia, Austin is 10x larger than Kansas City, KS. Google is planning on jumping into this with a test group of over 100,000 people, which is ambitious. It's likely that Google is taking a pragmatic engineering approach to this, like they are so famous for doing with all their products.
If Google is taking a pragmatic engineering approach with this, then why did they even bother asking communities if they wanted this? According to http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/public/list#KS Kansas City didn't even bother responding.
I work on a community wireless net in St. Louis, MO (http://gowasabi.net) that was founded with an intention, among others, of attracting Google Fiber here, and I submitted a proposal to Google about it. Likewise, the city gov't sent in its own proposal to get fiber downtown, along with countless other local groups.
http://stlcin.missouri.org/googlefiber/
I'm guessing many many other cities did the same.
While Google is indeed the 800lb gorilla here, it's not the only provider out there. If you're successful in getting Google to lend you really fast Net, that's awesome. If you're successful in getting similar service on your own, i.e. by micro-trenching your own fiber or negotiating a deal with a local bandwidth broker, that's actually much better.
