News today of yet another Google venture to provide internet access from the air, using satellites. As mentioned, it’s getting hard to keep up with all the Google “projects”, as literally there seems to be at least one fairly major one announced every week or so. This confirms somewhat the thesis that the MIT economists put forward in their recent book about rapid change period we are in: “Second Machine Age”.
Article today from TechCrunch says Google is trying hard to make internet access universal, and PSA is happy to hear about any steps that plausibly provide affordable access to underserved areas. But there’s more to this story, as some of these proposed technologies would also at least partially serve urban areas, and that potentially could provide much needed competition to monopoly telecoms. Devil in the tech details of costs per user.
Often the company that innovates fastest will eventually swallow up the companies that don’t. As Bucky Fuller suggested, change something by creating a new model that makes the old model obsolete. Google might eventually be able to route around cable to the home…and various cell phone technologies in place.
OTOH, there’s no guarantee that they will play nice if they can obtain the kind of monopoly that ATT, Verizon, Comcast have now. But at least their business model appears to be about maximizing the number of users, and not squeezing the biggest profit margins out of technology bottlenecks.