Is Google Going To Make Internet Access Available To Everyone?
May 24th, 2013Via: Bloomberg:
Google (GOOG) Chairman Eric Schmidt’s April 13 tweet was bold, ambitious, and a bit inexplicable. “For every person online, there are two that are not,” wrote the co-author of the book The New Digital Age. “By the end of the decade, everyone on Earth will be connected.”
Commenters were flummoxed by Schmidt’s prediction. There are many parts of the world without reliable telecommunications infrastructure. How do you wire parts of Africa—or the Indonesian archipelago?
In my conversations with Astro Teller, Google X’s excellently named director of moonshots, for this week’s cover story on Google X, I asked whether extending broadband Internet access throughout the world would be a problem deserving of attention from the top-secret lab. Teller gave nothing away, but it was clear from his answer that there’s plenty of passion for that particular goal inside his organization. “Having everyone connected is literally in the same category as making clean water available,” he said. “That sounds like a radical statement but I don’t think that it is. There is now a ton of evidence that connectivity drives freedom, democracy, economic development, health, and those things then turn into lower mortality and all of the things that we are trying to get at here.” Extending connectivity, he added, “is the most direct way, probably on an order of magnitude, to address the world’s biggest problems.”
