Peter: Twinkle twinkle private enterprise!

Summary of "Satellites beat balloons in race for flying internet"

OneWeb's vision for global
satellite coverage

According to "Satellites beat balloons in race for flying internet" by Zoe Kleinman, although still prohibitively costly for most consumers, global companies are again investing in satellite systems immune to bad weather to connect the world. Such systems had been seen as inefficient ways to deliver internet access in current “not spots,” where traditional broadband internet was not economically viable, but with the retirement of plans such as Google’s and Facebook’s networks of balloons and drones respectively, new efforts are being made by Elon Musk, Amazon and others to launch thousands of satellites to ensure internet access to all. Replying to concerns that so many satellites launched to increase profits will be harmful to their observations, Elon Musk answered that those concerns of astronomers will be taken into account in positioning the satellites, which should not interfere with telescope observation significantly more than the existing thousands do. 

Composing with Word count
in Google Docs

Note added Thursday, February 4:

With some substantial revision, I managed to include the previously missing points that satellites do not suffer from bad weather and that they are set up by businesses who want to make money from them. And the word count is now down from 150 to 147. It took me well over an hour to write this one short paragraph. 

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Peter's response to "Satellites beat balloons in race for flying internet"

What first interested me in this article was that the technologies we increasingly depend on to stay in touch with each other and the world of information are driven by large companies who try out new approaches as they seek to provide services that we will happily pay for. 

Twenty-five years ago, I was happy to pay Microsoft for their Windows and Office programs. Today, I still subscribe to MS Office, and my main personal Google account is also one I pay for. In addition I pay True for my home Internet connection by fibre optic cable, and dTac for my mobile connections. This means that I’m connected to everything anywhere. I can read the daily news via The Bangkok Post, the BBC, The New York Times and others with my morning coffee; I can do my banking from home, or on the street through my phone; and I can search for information on all of my devices. And of course, our class only exists because of the technology that Google has created for us, and which they kindly make available to educational institutions for free, presumably hoping that by introducing it to us that at least some of us will go on to become paying customers, or at least also start using their services that generate profits by selling advertising. In exchange for this convenience, I’m happy to contribute to the vast wealth of Bill Gates and the founders of Google, and billions of other users have made the similar decisions. 

I look back to when I was at university and the Internet had not been heard of. Thankfully, it happens very rarely, less than once a year these days, but when there is a break of more than a few seconds in my connection, it distresses me, which I guess means I’m addicted. But I’m addicted to food and breathing in similar ways, although the bad consequences of not eating or not breathing are more promptly serious than disruption to my Internet connection. In fact, I discovered a few months back when there was lengthy (hours!) interruption to my home Internet connection that my phone's 4G connection is powerful enough to run not only my computer connections but also NetFlix, although not quite so rapidly as the regular connection.  

When I read about Google’s balloon experiment some years ago, it seemed unlikely to me to work, and my guess has been proved right, but I might have been wrong. The only way to find out for sure was to try it, which Google did. Just as with learning a language, and discovering what works and what does not work for online learning requires taking risks by trying things. I’m not really that interested in business these days, but as I browse occasional articles on it, I keep seeing talk of taking risks, some of which will pay off and some of which won’t. 

Getting back to my first point, most of the most impressive developments that have radically changed our lives in the course of my own life so far have been driven by businesses who want to make money, and as with debates about how Covid-19 vaccines should be made available to people, there is often a lot of disagreement about the role that governments should play in developing and regulating these technologies on which we increasingly depend. My own opinion is that private enterprise generally does a better job than governments, whose role should be limited to the legal regulation that ensures fairness for everyone in a society, which is why I’m happier for Amazon and Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX fame, to be exploring the deployment of satellites to provide the next generation of global internet connectivity. But I wonder how that will work with 5G when I upgrade my phone later this year? 

Using version history
in Google Docs

Note on writing times, February 4, at 6:55 PM
It took me more than an hour's serious work going through the process to write and revise my summary paragraph above. Starting from my first idea from the BBC article and then jumping to others, my much longer response here, which Google's Word count tells me is 593 words, in contrast, took only 23 minutes (from 6:20 to 6:43) according to another cool Google Docs feature: Version history, available from the File menu. 

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Peter's question 

Should governments get involved in providing global communications systems or leave them to private corporations seeking profits?