Why flying 'Internet drones' over Africa is a dumb, libertarian fantasy

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/digital-culture/why-flying-internet-drones-over-africa-is-a-dumb-libertarian-fantasy/article17371996/

by IBM • 12 years ago

43 57 12 years ago

theglobeandmail.com

acchow2• 12 years ago

First: I don’t trust people in Silicon Valley to tell me what’s happening elsewhere in California, let alone what’s happening (or should be happening) in Africa.

But the first paragraph mentions the ubiquity in Africa of California-born Whatsapp, which isn't even that popular in Silicon Valley and California?

Oh, and Android.

danielweber• 12 years ago

When I think of libertarians, I think "people who want to spend their own money to bring Internet access to Africa." Yup.

slurry3• 12 years ago

It's like 'libertarian' has become just a generalized synonym for 'clueless douchebag', shorn of policy prescriptions.

Kroem3r• 12 years ago

Kind of sad, really, because it once had some useful meaning - like 15 years ago. And we hardly need another synonym for "clueless douchebag".

I have to admire the trajectory of the word's decline. It joins the ranks of "conservative", "liberal", and even "neoliberal".

21echoes2• 12 years ago

... with the stated intent of fostering freer markets outside of government regulation, and bringing these tools to people outside the scope of regulation, oversight, and tax burden. these points are what the article is about, if you actually had taken the time to read it.

and anyway, libertarians do believe in charity, just not government-coerced charity.

Crito3• 12 years ago

You don't have to be libertarian to be sceptical of the benevolence of African governments.

jessaustin2• 12 years ago

Hmmm, he's been to Ghana. Clearly he's an expert on the situation in Africa, because that country is so typical.

Apocryphon4• 12 years ago

How is it not? Certainly, one can't overgeneralize about such a huge continent. But it's neither South Africa, nor is it Somalia.

slurry3• 12 years ago

Ghana and (southern) Nigeria, where this guy has been, are among the most urbanized parts of the continent.

There are a lot of dense conurbations and they are fairly close to one another. That's obviously relevant for cell service.

Many parts of e.g. east and central Africa have lower-density settlement patterns that may be tougher to cover.

jessaustin2• 12 years ago

Much closer to the former than the latter, according to the Failed States Index Rankings:

http://ffp.statesindex.org/rankings

On that list, Somalia is ranked 1, while Ghana and South Africa are 110 and 113 respectively. (For comparison, Finland is the champ at 178.) Certainly there are other ways to compare nations, and Ghana is not a perfect society. However, Ghana is exceptional among African nations, and it is a measure of the cluelessness of TFA that this fact isn't mentioned.

Havoc2• 12 years ago

Spot on. The entire idea is bullshit. In the more prosperous its not an issue. e.g. MTN alone has 1000+ LTE towers here. And in the less prosperous area people care about having safe drinking water not Facebook.

Nobody is really speaking out against it though. If google wants to throw some balloons in the air let them - its their risk.

devx2• 12 years ago

You say that, but I've seen it before in my own poor country - people would rather buy expensive smartphones than better food.

This technology matters to people. The Internet matters to people, more than you think. Because it's not just a technology, it's a way to connect people. That's why it can be more important than safe drinking water or food to a lot of people. It's not just a matter of "gadget vs staying alive". There are other fundamental issues at stake here.

There is also research that shows that the more technologically advanced an area is, the richer it becomes - which means jobs, infrastructure, and food and clean water for people. So don't dismiss it so easily.

Technology through phones and Internet is also helping people have more democratic states, which is also a pretty critical issue in Africa. People can talk to each other and inform themselves better. They can organize and protest. They can chase away the dictators this way. So who are you to say that clean water is definitely more important to them than technology?

acchow2• 12 years ago

You say that, but I've seen it before in my own poor country - people would rather buy expensive smartphones than better food.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

colechristensen• 12 years ago

Would you say communications infrastructure is the best way to help poor developing nations?

Havoc2• 12 years ago

people would rather buy expensive smartphones than better food. [...] This technology matters to people.

I wish. They buy the smartphone as a status symbol not because tech matters to them.

Certainly tech brings wide ranging benefits, but much like Maslow's hierarchy of needs you need to fulfill the basics first. Jumping straight to the top doesn't make the rest magically appear.

It might differ by country but here tech in general favours the middle class. The really poor are just too far behind to leverage it. What good is access to the internet if the guy can't read?

They can chase away the dictators this way. So who are you to say that clean water is definitely more important to them than technology?

What good is chasing away dictators if you die from dehydration on day 3 of the protest? Unlike drinkable water, iphones are optional to survival.

tsomctl• 12 years ago

Internet is essential in areas without safe drinking water, where it can be used to educate people.

devx2• 12 years ago

How is this nonsense even being upvoted here?

Who seriously thinks Google and Facebook bringing the Internet to the whole of Africa isn't a good thing for Africans? The only things I'd be worried about in this case is

1) Google/Facebook enabling mass surveillance of Africans, against Africans' will, but there would be nothing they can do about it except "stop using the Internet", in their case, since they wouldn't be able to control them (at least that's what the author is insinuating, too)

2) They serve a very restricted version of the 'Internet', where they heavily promote their own services

But in case 1) the majority of the African countries already decided to implement deep packet inspection at the ISP level at that last ITU meeting, and other such technologies to enable mass surveillance of Africas, and in case 2), I can't imagine they would do that, because their services would become a lot less useful, too.

As for stuff like providing competition to their local carriers - come on. Most ISP's and carriers can't cover the whole Africa and they won't do it anytime soon anyway in the traditional way. Either they do this sort of stuff themselves in the future, or others do it before them. One way or the other, it's much easier to bring Internet to the whole of Africa this way, from the sky.

dublinben• 12 years ago

Why do you not think it's likely that Facebook or Google would heavily promote their own services? That's exactly what AOL provided when you accessed the 'internet' through an AOL dialup account. If these projects are intended to be profitable, then they'll be heavily taking advantage of the captive audience that's using them.

ataggart2• 12 years ago

That's exactly what AOL provided when you accessed the 'internet' through an AOL dialup account.

And where is AOL now?

olgeni• 12 years ago

"In Ghana, well-resourced foreign providers came in, did the gritty work of building up infrastructure [...] and genuinely tried hard to win customers from other providers."

Basically: the free market provided Internet access, but libertarians are stupid.

21echoes2• 12 years ago

those foreign providers provided a service with government regulation, oversight, and pay taxes. the proposed google and facebook solutions do none of those things.

pjscott8• 12 years ago

How is this better for people than a company that just moves packets around?

I mean, government regulation and oversight are presumably means to an end, rather than goals in themselves, so tell me: in this case, what advantage do they offer? If we were talking about, say, emissions regulations for a factory, or worker safety regulations, or something like that, then I could see the case for it. But for this? Man, I just want my packets to go from one place to another.

glenra2• 12 years ago

FWIW, Somalia developed excellent cellphone coverage - better than many of its neighbors - during a time when it effectively had no government.

https://www.hiiraan.com/op4/2007/mar/2432/the_phones_keep_ri...

qq66• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure the "Internet access" idea is just a pleasant cover story for whatever other aerospace/UAV research projects Google and Facebook want to invest in.

pjscott8• 12 years ago

Don't be so sure. If this turns out to be a cost-competitive way to get internet access over the last mile (or last several miles) to customers, then there's some real money to be made.

doctorfoo• 12 years ago

Why can't it just be a "dumb" fantasy? Why does it have to be a dumb libertarian fantasy? I don't see anything particularly libertarian about it. If anything, the existing infrastructure there is a vaguely libertarian thing, the product of their own self determination, and the Google-ish meddling is merely run of the mill capitalistic scheming.

A great article otherwise though.

patrickaljord• 12 years ago

Libertarian bashing seems to be fashionable lately. Which is funny because most people in power are not libertarians.

ataggart2• 12 years ago

Which is funny because most people in power are not libertarians.

A profound understatement.

forgottenpass• 12 years ago

Which is funny because most people in power are not libertarians

I didn't know someone had to be in government before their ideology could be considered silly.

Libertarian bashing seems to be fashionable lately.

Of course it is. Many of the libertarian voices I hear these days are off the rails. Some, but not all, of my politics are libertarian but in the last few years I stopped saying as much because I don't want to get lumped in with the loons. There is a lot of untenable wishful utopian thinking seen as axiomatic going around these days.

Apocryphon4• 12 years ago

I don't think that it's particularly libertarian at the core "laissez-faire good, government coercion bad" sense. It seems like it embodies an ethos where corporations are the ones pushing innovation, while governments either stand by, or become cheerleaders for them, or are impotent archaic dinosaurs trying to impede brave private enterprise. All of which seems vaguely Objectivist. It's a far cry from the sort of close, symbiotic collaboration between government and private contractors in the defense industry, or say in the '50s and '60s during the Space Race.

Why the focus on corporations? I think it's just another generalization- when we talk about libertarian innovation, it's often about Objectivist-looking titans of industry singlehandedly shaping the market and keeping the big bad taxman away, as opposed to autonomous small-scale hacker collectives, or the little guy in a private workshop.

I'd just prefer to call it "cyberpunk."

Fasebook• 12 years ago

Oh, just using words for maximum effectiveness. The title wouldn't have carried near the political weight if the title was "don't even think about competing against established carriers in Africa, we own this bitch" or "Africa has billions of dollars in opportunities for risk-averse inverters and burgeoning oligarchs." or "Trust us, we got this telecommunication and logistics in a politically unstable atmosphere all figured out, there's NOTHING competing forms of communication could ever offer the people of Africa."

See how ineffective these titles are? Isn't it much more effective to assume the identity of fiscal conservatives and deflate the funding out of a potential market before it's even born by appealing to those who make most of the economic decisions?

I think it helps to consider HN not as a public forum, but as a capitalist/democratic wind vane or a PR game sandbox. Remember, you can say whatever you want here but only up-voted and approved comments will be seen by others.

coldtea4• 12 years ago

Why can't it just be a "dumb" fantasy? Why does it have to be a dumb libertarian fantasy? I don't see anything particularly libertarian about it.

Well, other than the libertarians who thought of it, and those that support it.

manicdee• 12 years ago

Too many people are confusing "Capitalist" with "libertarian."

Learn the difference, then understand that there's nothing "libertarian" about making money from avoiding a sovereign power's taxes while sabotaging their communications infrastructure.

throwaway_yy2Di3• 12 years ago

* What's this Freudian obsession with tax-avoiding libertarians?

* How exactly do you avoid paying taxes on something that's free?

pjscott8• 12 years ago

I don't think that this, or Google's balloon project, are supposed to be free. Cheap, sure -- they have competitors on the ground. But for something like this to stay aloft, they'll need to charge enough money to at least have a plausible chance of recovering their operating expenses at some point.

throwaway_yy2Di3• 12 years ago

The author claims they would be free at a couple points in the article.

On re-reading, that's precisely one of his complaints: providing a free service deprives governments of tax revenue.

    "Carriers, some of them foreign but some of them local,
    have been in many of these markets for years, providing
    for a fee services that companies such as Google and
    Facebook now want to provide for free. And they are big
    local employers (in Ghana, I was told Vodafone was the
    largest private employer), as well as taxpayers.
    
    [...] Essentially, these companies are trying to reap
    the reward of encouraging more people to use their
    services, such as WhatsApp, without doing the messy
    work that carriers and handset makers such as Nokia and
    Samsung do; that is, actually setting up businesses on
    the ground, paying taxes that help fund development and
    social services, employing and training that nation’s
    citizens, not to mention building real relationships."

Apocryphon4• 12 years ago

This article definitely makes some good points addressing the paternalist and potentially disconnected attitudes that foreign companies have towards Africa. But it doesn't bring up enough examples of local African companies, individuals, or initiatives that are pushing for their own solutions to Google's (and it seems, Facebook's) plans. He mentions CCHub, but that's about the only name.

pekk• 12 years ago

I'm sure everyone in Africa who is suspicious of the west will be enraptured at the idea of permanently ceding rights to their sovereign airspace, having drones permanently circling over them, easily monitoring all their communications and maybe taking photographs too.

Everybody in Africa trusts us implicitly, and why shouldn't they?

pjscott8• 12 years ago

You're aware of satellites, right?

coldtea4• 12 years ago

You are aware they are way above national airspace that matters, right?

joe_the_user• 12 years ago

If the drone technology succeeds, it will succeed as technology rather than as charity. Describing the projecting as bringing something to Africa is indeed dumb but this is a comment on the hype, not the project itself.

Just consider, wireless tech is inherently more efficient over time than wired tech for a huge variety of applications. Wireless phones are replacing wired phones in the Western world and given sufficient advances, it seems logical wireless will replace the Internet duopolies and monopolies in the Western world.

It seems just as logical for wireless transmission points to replace wired transmission points. Hence mobile, wireless drones seem a logical step. Africa is a logical place for this, not because of the great needs of the po' Africans but because the infrastructure is not fully developed, because transmission points are especially expensive there and because the market is fairly open.

We know that Google and Facebook are companies that make their money giving stuff to the consumer for free. So these companies offering drone-based Internet to Africa sounds like a logical business step - if/once the tech is ready and working well. And of course these companies us the litany of "we're hear to help the poor benighted Africans" but that's for the consumption of the Western public who can't imagine Africans as paying consumers.

Altogether, I'm by no means uncritical of the present unbridled advanced of every sort of tech but ordinary African cellphone providers are far, far back on my list of folks whose suffering I might cry over. Plus I'd expect that given an African demonstration, the drone tech would let a figurative Google drone army surround Comcast's Dark Tower and figuratively burn it to the ground using affordable rates.

igl• 12 years ago

Spreading mind numbing american media is libertarian?

pjscott8• 12 years ago

Are you implying that increased internet access would somehow reduce the diversity of media people are exposed to? That has not been my experience.

Why flying 'Internet drones' over Africa is a dumb, libertarian fantasy

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