Satellites, Drones, and Balloons: The Right to Connect and Aerial Internet Infrastructure

• In Event: Technology, Inequality, and Social Justice - II

Abstract

Between 2013 and 2014, four Silicone Valley-based companies began to develop aerial technologies for providing internet access to remote areas where there is currently none. While the technological solutions to the problem of internet access in remote areas differed, ranging from LEO satellites to high altitude balloons and solar powered drones, they were all developed to solve the same problem: the “connectivity gap” between the developed and the developing world. Using historical documents and early ITU reports alongside current statements and scientific papers, I ask what concept of global connectivity is reflected in technologies for “internet from above,” and how, in turn, the designed technologies shape what global connectivity come to mean to regulatory agencies, private companies, and citizens of developing countries.

Using a historically-based STS perspective, I argue that satellites, balloons and drones promote a technical concept of connectivity, removed from its legal, political, or regulatory aspects. First, I show how connectivity was reconfigured as a technical problem of physical infrastructure rather than a legal or a political one. Second, I show how physical infrastructure in general, and internet infrastructure specifically, is a site for the active negotiation of citizenship and care. I describe the origins and development of satellites, drones, and balloons to provide internet access from above. Aerial infrastructures, while celebrated as flexible and cheap solutions, are temporary and mobile in nature. Comparing traditional and aerial internet infrastructures brings to the forefront the question of who should care for citizens in developing countries and in what way.

Author

• Alex Reiss Sorokin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology