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Tue Feb 8 22:51:24 2011
Free Internet
More thoughts on free Internet...

Internet (and communications) to the people!
Image courtesy of Philip Halling

In my previous post ( Upheavals in the Middle East) I mentioned my crazy idea for giving free Internet connections (and smart phones) to people in repressive regimes. The idea is that by having the the ability to communicate with each other and the outside world, people in those countries would be able to avoid one of the chief tools of repression: limited access to information.

Also, within repressive regimes, access to communications and outside information can itself be an agent for change and improvement--and even revolution. Witness how Tunisia and Egypt both attempted to crack down on the Internet during the recent protests, with Egypt going to particular extremes.

In fact, Egypt cut off Internet access just as I was posting my blog entry about using the Internet as an asymmetric attack against repressive regimes! Talk about coincidences.

Yesterday Slashdot had a link to a story about how the US has secret tools to force Internet on dictatorships (which references a Wired story as the primary source), which I thought was awesome timing given my blog post! Obviously both Wired and Slashdot read my blog a lot.

However, the story isn't quite what I was thinking. The Wired story talks about how the US Gov't could take out foreign computer networks (hardly news) or even restore some Internet service to localized areas via flying networks or satellite dish drops.

North Korea guards--here's looking at you!
Image courtesy of Edward N. Johnson

All in all, I found it pretty underwhelming, and small-scale. Plus, as the article noted, flying our own aircraft in someone else's airspace could be construed as an act of war, even if we were just flying Internet relay stations.

No, it's way better to go the full deal. Set up satellite-based internet, using satellite-enabled smart phones or routers. Then people could get access to the Internet, and communicate with each other, without us having to invade peoples' air space. In fact, we could just provide satellite-based Internet hubs, and people could use their own smart phones. That would be more flexible and cheaper.

[Providing a satellite network does raise the problem of antisatellite weapons, but having satellites isn't by itself an act of war.]

Would providing a satellite-based Internet for North Korea, China, or Myanmar be expensive? Sure, maybe billions of dollars a year. But a war costs billions of dollars a week. So providing free satellite-based Internet to repressive regimes could be even more effective, at a fraction of the price, not even counting the lives saved.

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