Africa, Web Access: What Google's Doing Right

In all of the hubbub -- good and bad -- about Google's 10th anniversary this week, one story about the company didn't get all of the attention it deserved.

As you may or may not have heard, on Tuesday, Google announced that it has joined in a consortium with several other companies to create the O3b ("the other 3 billion") Network. Its avowed goal is to bring high-speed wireless Internet to until-now underserved regions of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

To accomplish this, O3b plans to launch a network of 16 low-earth orbit communications satellites by the end of 2010. This network, the consortium claims, will increase the world's Web-connected population to just more than 3 billion people … in other words, essentially what is currently the world's entire work force.


I've written about this Third Billion before, much of it revolving around what is increasingly being seen as one great transitional year in human history: 2011. Most of my thoughts on this have derived from the work of my colleague Tom Hayes and his recent book, "Jump Point."

What Hayes has long argued is that when the word's entire labor force becomes interconnected via the Web, all sorts of extraordinary networking effects will start emerging: the world's first million-employee company, the first trillion-dollar corporation, an explosion in new inventions and patents arising from a doubling of the world's available intellectual capital, new fads and trends from the most unlikely places racing around the planet overnight, new centers of power … and dangerous new threats.

And now, Google, in a very gutsy move, has just put Hayes' predictions right on schedule.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in southern Africa in the course of this decade (and going back next summer), for me, the O3b Network announcement comes as welcome news.

Far better that a private consortium upgrade the technical infrastructure of the region than leaving it to the World Bank or some other international agency. Being a commercial enterprise -- that is, it has to show a profit to shareholders -- Google will be committed to making this project actually work, which is more than can be said for most International Aid endeavors. With Google's involvement, I fully expect to be posting this column from Namibia, via my cell phone, in 2012.

You probably also know, if you have followed this column for any time, that I have pretty strong feelings about what Africa (and the rest of the underdeveloped world) needs to pull itself up into the 21st century. A technology infrastructure was just one of those factors, and thanks to Google et al, we may finally be starting to solve that one. The other three -- and all four interact to create either a virtuous or vicious cycle -- are education, trust (meaning political stability, reduced corruption and the rule of law) and capital.

I don't know enough about the rest of the developing world to make any predictions about the impact of the O3b Network. But I can talk about sub-Saharan Africa. And there's two things I know about the region: 1. It is ready, like no time in the last half-century, to make the leap to the world economy; and 2. All victories in Africa are small ones, and all change is two steps forward and (if you are lucky) one step back.









With a growing tradition of political stability and increasing confidence with the rule of law, combined with the arrival of a sophisticated technological infrastructure as signaled by the O3b Network, the countries will soon be halfway there (and, indeed, in their big cities, thousands of professionals already are).

That leaves education -- elementary is already good, secondary fair and university level pretty poor unless you're white -- and capital. Africa is a land of entrepreneurs, who unfortunately have no access to either money or distribution.

What makes O3b interesting, and the arrival to widespread wireless broadband to Africa perhaps historic, is that its very presence may help to solve those last two challenges.

If a kid in Missouri can take courses online from Cal or Harvard, why not a kid in Malawi? And if the owner of a small business in Marin can sell craft items around the world via a Web site, why not a shopkeeper in Livingstone? And, once a venture capitalist knows that a local economy is safe from crime, government expropriation or the rule of bribery, why wouldn't he or she invest in a new startup in Botswana, in the same way that VC does now in China?

The problem with the poor people of Africa is not that they are stupid, but that they are off the grid. And that, too often, they are at the mercy of people who see them only as pawns.

Google may be doing some scary things these days, but this isn't one of them. Watch what happens when the people of Africa join us in the global economy; when they discover that instead of being pawns they can be kings.

