Google is no stranger to disrupting old ways to offer customers access to the internet. In 2010, the company launched Google Fiber, its take on distributing low-cost, gigabit internet access to specified regions. Compared to the pseudo-monopoly the cable-internet companies have set up, the Google Fiber approach may already be changing what types of internet speeds existing service providers offer, and the costs. Now the search company wants to do the same for your cell carrier.
By the end of the year, nearly 3 billion people in the world will have Internet access, according to the latest annual Measuring the Information Society (MIS) Report from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). That's an increase of 6.6 percent over the previous year, continuing a steady trend upward that's been in place for the last decade.
When the soon-to-be-defunct government of president Hosni Mubarak shut off Egypt's Internet early on the morning of January 28, 2020, it proved the US State Department's working theory: that the arc of history bends toward democracy, but it needs Internet access to get there. One project meant to ensure what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls "the freedom to connect" is an "Internet-in-a-suitcase," a kit of wireless routers and software that could be smuggled into an authoritarian country and allow revolutionaries to set up their own local area network (LAN) on the fly. Its developers at the public policy institute the New America Foundation call the concept "device as infrastructure," a platform that operates on its own, without requiring a connection to the broader Internet. By avoiding the traditional phone-company cables-and, in the process, a connection to the backbone of the Internet-this ad hoc network would be extremely difficult to monitor or shut down.
