Google has actually been working on the white-spaces concept for about six years, according to Page. A team of two engineers was the "tiny little pumpkin" that grew into a project big enough to bring one of the company's founders together with the nation's top communications regulator.

"We have a small group who was working on interesting wireless ideas and they got really excited about this, and that's how we got into it," Page said.

Martin and Page have had a meeting of minds partly because of a professed shared interest in opening up wireless networks. In the white-spaces initiative, Google was a key advocate of using geolocation to determine whether a white-spaces device is in a place where it could conflict with other spectrum users, according to Martin. Location information can then be checked against a database of broadcasters and their coverage areas.

"Their involvement in helping us address how we're going to solve some of the interference concerns in the white spaces was critical," Martin said.

But Martin said Google's demands for open-network requirements in the FCC's 700MHz spectrum auctions earlier this year also helped bring about a sea change in the mobile industry, away from "walled gardens" of carrier-provided devices and applications to networks that allow any device and any service. It's a shift Martin said he welcomes.

"Within a relatively short amount of time -- a little over a year -- you've seen a transformation in the direction of wireless," Martin said.

Google was able to exert pressure on the FCC to change the auction rules even though the company didn't actually end up with the winning bid on any licenses.

"We actually owned some 700MHz spectrum for one weekend," Page quipped. "It was a long weekend."