Technology Review

Who is Starlink really for?

Starlink hopes to bring high-speed satellite internet to many of the 3.7 billion people on this planet who currently have no internet connection at all. SpaceX’s internet service, which uses a growing fleet of 1,600 satellites orbiting Earth to deliver internet access to people on the surface, reported close to 90,000 users in July 2021. Underdeveloped parts of the world might find Starlink to be a boon, since many of these places do not have physical networks like the cable system.

What does breaking up Big Tech really mean?

Over the past four or five years, scholars, politicians, and public advocates have begun to push a new idea of what antitrust policy should be, arguing that we need to move away from a narrow focus on consumer welfare—which in practice has usually meant a focus on prices—toward consideration of a much wider range of possible harms from companies’ exercise of market power: damage to suppliers, workers, competitors, customer choice, and even the political system as a whole.

The internet is excluding Asian-Americans who don’t speak English

The web itself is built on an English-first architecture, and most of the big social media platforms that host public discourse in the United States put English first too. And as technologies become proxies for civic spaces in the United States, the primacy of English has been magnified. For Asian-Americans, the move to digital means that access to democratic institutions—everything from voting registration to local news—is impeded by linguistic barriers. 

The high price of broadband is keeping people offline during the pandemic

For as long as the internet has existed, there has been a divide between those who have it and those who do not, with increasingly high stakes for people stuck on the wrong side of America’s “persistent digital divide.” That’s one reason why, from the earliest days of his presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to make universal broadband a priority. But Biden’s promise has taken on extra urgency as a result of the pandemic.

Why the “homework gap” is key to America’s digital divide

A Q&A with Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel on the “homework gap,” the term she coined to describe a problem facing communities where kids can’t access the internet because infrastructure is inadequate, their families can’t afford it, or both. Commissioner Rosenworcel is passionate about getting the FCC to update the E-Rate program, a federal education technology service created in 1996 that offers schools and libraries discounted internet access. 

A world divided into “cans” and “cannots”

In the last few decades, the received wisdom among global elites has been that technology tends to make the world flatter, smaller, more open, and more equal. This now seems increasingly false, or at least simplistic. Countries are vying for dominance in technologies that could give them a strategic advantage: communications, energy, AI, surveillance, agricultural tech, cybersecurity, military tech … and now, amidst a global pandemic, medicine, and manufacturing.

A plan to redesign the internet could make apps that no one controls

Cyberspace is ruled today by the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu—a small handful of the biggest companies on earth. But  it is clear that a desire for revolution is brewing. “We’re taking the internet back to a time when it provided this open environment for creativity and economic growth, a free market where services could connect on equal terms,” says Dominic Williams, Dfinity’s founder and chief scientist.