Progress via a True Global Internet In our contemporary world, one of the most important factors constraining the growth of societies is lack of information. In some places, infrastructure is not sufficiently developed in communications and electricity and the availability of electronics in the market to even allow people to connect to the information available via the internet. In other places, totalitarian governments partially or entirely limit the access their people have to the information available on the internet.
Information is extremely valuable. It can give farmers advance information about expected weather, best practices, and anticipated prices in the domestic and export markets. It can give students and teachers up to date knowledge and ready access to resources for learning as well as enabling collaboration.
Information sharing can help like minded individuals organize for political movements and promote social causes. Information can inform citizens on the state of the world and their own nations. Information can help people anticipate and respond to disasters. Information is power.
So, what can we do about it?
Through the cold war, open, free societies proved that they could out-produce controlled, closed societies. Via an arms race that included the lunar exploration voyages and "Star Wars", the free world induced a competition where their opponents could not keep up. The eventual economic burden becoming so great that one-party-rule-communism collapsed throughout most of the world. [ad name="Adsense Small Horz Banner"] Now, open, free societies can induce a new competition where today's closed nations cannot keep up. Currently, internet access in many areas is limited by censoring governments. This is reatively easy as they purchased and control all of network hardware infrastructure. But, what if, instead, the internet was a pervasive field accessible everywhere on the surface of the Earth with something no more complex than a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or satellite phone, which could be subsidized for poor nations. That kind of situation can be realized quickly. We don't have to plead and cajole and hope that dictators and oligarchs will allow their societies more access to information. We can give it to them in a few years.
Internet via satellite is already available. With enough satellites we could cover the surface of the Earth like we have with the Global Positioning System (GPS).
Then, instead of easily controlling their society's access with a switch, censoring governments would be forced to blanket their nations with jamming equipment and conduct searches for the portable receivers. This could be accomplished at a very small fraction of western nations' military expenditures, not to mention their entire economies.
Similar technology, could operate on land more inexpensively in friendly countries neighboring the targets of this effort. Using several different technologies and frequency bands would quickly push the costs of preventing this effort out of the range of most closed nations budgets. In a few short years, we would no longer have to wonder about what message was reaching whom. We could be assured that each side's message was reaching everyone. And, in a battle of ideas, if you have the better ideas (which could be assumed just from the censoring that occurs in some places), you could want nothing better.
In this arms race, no shots would be fired, no threatening demonstrations would be needed. Free peoples could remove a major impediment to self-determination and human rights for the less free. And, to twist Marx's phrase about capitalists and rope, I'm sure certain nations would gladly sell us the circuit cards and other electronics we would use to undermine their censorship. May the next President of the United States help lead the world to this kind of future.
