Alphabet, the company that owns Google, will scrap plans to float giant balloons to deliver internet to what it had estimated to be the half of humankind still disconnected. This may make Loon—the unfortunate name for this project—second only to the Hindenburg as the biggest balloon disaster ever. Loon had launched balloons 1,750 times since 2013 and logged a million flight (float?) hours. The project was on of Alphabet’s “Other Bets,” a segment that lost $3.3 billion in the first 3 quarters of 2020. Sundar Pichai, CEO, may not be scrapping all of Google’s moonshots that he inherited but they can expect “more discipline,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Loon project may have aimed too high for Google’s newfound austerity. Its gigantic helium-filled balloons would float 60,00 to 75,000 feet above the Earth and deliver the Internet to an area 200 times larger than a cell tower’s coverage. It seemed like a good idea: using lighter than air gas balloons that require no energy to maintain their lofty position forever—unlike having to launch satellites in space, which is highly energy intensive.
Google’s balloons relied on AI-based system that tried to ride swirling stratospheric winds back and forth to maintain their position over their station. It’s all explained here: In the Cloud: AI-Controlled Balloons.
Google exiting their plan to connect the world is harsh and unapologetic, like a lover dropping a breakup bomb out of the blue. There is no “we can still be friends,” no Plan B. We are left with questions. Can we try lower altitude balloons? Can we tether the balloons to eliminate lofting heavy, energy-sucking computers? Don’t leave us at the mercy of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon satellite networks. What do those guys (the number 1 and 2 of the richest people on Earth, respectively) care about us?
But with Google losing altruistic interest, we have no choice but to trust other private companies and their starry-eyed plans of satellite-based Internet that will blanket the Earth. It doesn’t seem that any government is stepping up to lay what is the most vital infrastructure in our modern age, superhighways of information that connect us all, like the asphalt highways and steel railways that were created for us all in another age.
Google was once seen as the most magnanimous of all tech companies, giving away every product for free. Their ambitious moonshot projects spent billions of dollars and seemed to be for the good of all. There was the plan to snake submarine cables across ocean floors, lay fiber optic cables in cities, creating smart cities within cities (Toronto’s Sidewalk Labs), bringing autonomous vehicles to us all (Waymo). We knew that Google was generously granting web access, making more digital citizens, so it could make more money by selling advertising and services (Google Cloud), but since someone else was paying for advertising, we didn’t care.
Google seemed happy to pick up the costs, always the rich old dad who insists on the bill at the fancy restaurant no matter how old the kids. But Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai thinks the let-Dad-pay practice is getting old. The kids have been spoiled. They will have to adjust. They’ll have to find cheaper places to eat, a willing partner or—horror of horrors—pick up the bill themselves.