Project Loon: Google’s biggest obstacle isn’t technology, it's politics

http://gigaom.com/2013/06/21/project-loon-googles-biggest-obstacle-isnt-technology-its-politics/

by kfitchard • 13 years ago

54 35 13 years ago

gwgarry• 13 years ago

So Google can eavesdrop on everyone's communication globally and relay that to the US government. If I were a foreign government I would tell them to fuck off. There is no point in having a spy network of a corporation that belongs to another nation in your airspace. If they want to build such a network, open source the technology and let nations' own organizations that are under the democratic control of those nations build that technology.

leoc3• 13 years ago

The sad fact remains that many, maybe most people around the world are better off (sometimes a lot better off) having their Internet spied on by the US than having it spied on by their home government, or than not having Internet at all. The extra problem with having national Loon-a-like networks is that (as the OP says) apparently it goes against the grain of those stratospheric winds.

pavs2• 13 years ago

Enough with the "holier than thou" selective morality.

fiatjaf• 13 years ago

Google does not belong to the US government.

etherael• 13 years ago

If they can compel them to do anything they like, does the technicality of ownership really matter?

I used to trust Google but I don't trust any government, sure as hell not the most megalomaniacal and power hungry one on the entire planet. By extension the rational perspective to take in light of recent revelations is to treat all entities subject to US law as if they were the US government proper. A people who are not permitted to dissent from their government are effectively indistinguishable from it.

Concerning stuff.

cinquemb• 13 years ago

Google is a legal entity that is effectively recognized as a person under the USG, not the other way around. Many cities are also incorperated. Are those cities not legally apart and under the influence of the USG since they are incorperated?

shiven• 13 years ago

Yes, you're right. But actually, in practice, it and other US companies are the US government's bitches. All to be ridden via proxies known as FISA/FBI/CIA/NSA/PRISM or other acronyms we don't even know yet.

frozenport3• 13 years ago

I am shocked people are down-voting a matter of fact statement. Sorry about that.

MostAwesomeDude• 13 years ago

Loons aren't eavesdroppers. They only operate on very specific spectra in order to ensure high bandwidth.

ge0rg• 13 years ago

They transmit on very specific frequencies, but they could have wide-band receivers on board, listening to whatever is interesting to the operators (filtering has to be applied because the downlink is limited).

packetslave2• 13 years ago

Why would Google want to "eavesdrop on everyone's communication globally and relay that to the US government"? What possible business benefit could that have?

magicalist3• 13 years ago

Uh, vs any other possible ISP that would provide internet access? Or is it better just to not provide access at all?

Luckily strong encryption tools are built into every browser out there by default that prevents the ISP from seeing what you're doing on the web beyond the domain you are connecting to, and there are tools like Tor that can protect you even from logging of that.

Meanwhile, how will a nation build an internet providing balloon only for itself when the wind carries those balloons around the entire planet? And the very point of the project is to provide internet where there is currently none, meaning "organizations that are under the democratic control of those nations" (making the huge assumption that any particular country we're talking about is a democracy) haven't found it economically feasible and/or desirable to provide internet in these places.

What a golden example of a "middlebrow" dismissal.

klibertp2• 13 years ago

IIRC those balloons stay in place, thanks to being able to change altitudes. When the wind start to blow in an undesirable direction or is too strong, the balloon can just get to the lower or higher place, where the wind is just right. That's exactly what normal balloons do and it seems to work.

Because of that I think that giving the balloons to the countries is perfectly possible - just hand them the remote for the ones above their heads.

camus• 13 years ago

Google biggest problem is that they are not above the law of foreign countries that want to protect themself against NSA puppets.

eck• 13 years ago

How long before some unstable government seeking to wreck havoc on its world’s communications infrastructure starts shooting down Loon balloons overhead?

I suspect that the surface-to-air missiles capable of striking targets at that altitude are an order of magnitude more expensive than what it costs Google to replace balloons.

If Iran or North Korea starts shooting down balloons, I bet the US Government will be happy to quietly reimburse the replacement cost simply to deplete the supply of SAMs that could be shot at other things.

antninja• 13 years ago

Google could still turn off the balloons above the hostile nations. Saying: we can give you cheap Internet if you want of nothing if you don't want.

If balloons have a camera, they would at least provide higher-definition data for Maps.

packetslave2• 13 years ago

Loon balloons do not have cameras.

phire• 13 years ago

At the project loon launch event, I asked the google people about installing cameras. They stated that they had very clearly decided not to install cameras because they didn't want any issues to distract them from their stated goal of providing internet.

fouc2• 13 years ago

Project loon shouldn't be corporate-based, it should be grassroots.

Give out free plans to build balloon mesh network access points for less than $5-10, and let people of the world build their own.

BONUS POINTS: Implementation runs its own fully decentralized network that could eventually surpass Internet 1.0

magicalist3• 13 years ago

It would be difficult to build a terrestrial mesh network of appreciable power even while plugged in to the wall for $5-10 per node, let alone one on a balloon in the stratosphere with no source of power, etc. The helium alone is over $2.50 per cubic meter (according to[1], others might know better, and maybe you could use hydrogen, but then there's problems with leakage and how long your balloon stays up). The balloons also work much better in places with no power nearby, or with such spread out infrastructure that you'll need much longer line of site than anything on the ground can provide.

But! Grassroots mesh networking is still very possible, and very important, especially as an internet alternative in places where internet access has been censored or shut down (or even just cell access has been shut down...which happens more than it should here in the US).

For anyone interested, the EFF just put out a plea for helping invalidate some bullshit patents on mesh networking to ensure that grassroot efforts to actually help people can move forward. More here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/mesh-networking-good-o...

Edit: just submitted the EFF story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5924690 weird that it hasn't been submitted before. I feel a bit like advocacy on HN has about the same motivations as what makes the top stories on crappy tech blogs these days...

[1] http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/helium/mcs-...

fouc2• 13 years ago

If the mesh routers were cheap enough it would just come down to making lots of them and distributing them all over your local area. As a result, they wouldn't need to be that powerful. Attaching them to balloons is somewhat optional. Perhaps even better, hand them out for free to neighbours that can plug them in as well.

Linksys WRT54G from 2004-2005 used to be $60-70, and powerful enough to be flashed with better firmware. It's almost 10 years later (and sadly wrt54g has been heavily watered down). Perhaps we need a kickstarter to get cheap mesh network routers using 2004 tech, get costs down to $5/router somehow.

bumbledraven• 13 years ago

Since Loon will use radios, it will have to use spectrum, which is tightly regulated by the world’s governments.

Yes, but Google can just have the balloons turn off their radios when flying over a country with whom a spectrum agreement hasn't been reached.

frozenport3• 13 years ago

Why not Satellites? Sounds like everything these balloons do.

DanBC• 13 years ago

Satellites are considerably more expensive, and have a lot more lag.

I am interested in the helium, considering it's a non-renewable resource with limited stocks. As I understand it (and I'm probably wrong) I thought one of the problems with high altitude balloons was that helium leaked more readily.

It's a fascinating project, and I'm really glad that there are companies like Google doing this kind of stuff.

wcoenen• 13 years ago

Not enough satellite spectrum, high launch costs, not enough LEO slots, can't be deployed on short notice, requires larger antennae on the ground for high bandwidth. [1]

[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130618-googl...

malandrew• 13 years ago

Approximately how many loons are required to give coverage to most of the world?

If the density of loons per 100 square kilometers isn't too high, mesh networking together with GPS should be sufficiently evolved at some point to make it a network very robust to attacks by government. It's also possible that the networks can discard GPS-assisted routing data before beaming that content back down to earth, ensuring that we won't even be able to determine the geographic origin of any packets.

I would imagine that one of the few things out there that may help us combat the balkanization of the internet and eavesdropping will be the ability to have extra national communications in the sky. I think the best thing would be to actually set up many of the loons as Tor exit nodes. If the price of hardware gets cheap enough the ease of putting these in the sky and not worrying about them will be awesome.

Project Loon: Google’s biggest obstacle isn’t technology, it's politics

Related Stories