“The Long Game” is the title of the third episode of the new Doctor Who Series 1. In that episode, the Ninth Doctor, his assistant, Rose, and some random guy arrive on a space station floating somewhere above the earth. It’s centuries in the future, and the earth is experiencing a new golden age, thanks largely to the space station.

This satellite, floating somewhere in the sky, is much like Google: all of the world’s information is stored and sorted and rebroadcast on thousands of channels back down to the earth. Desktop computers are somewhat obsolete, since the “reporters” on board the satellite have the most interesting gadgets that open up their foreheads and send a steady stream of information directly into their brains.

This is my favorite episode. But what happens when nefarious forces start to control the information? If all of the world’s information is sorted and stored and rebroadcast from one entity, what happens when some kind of intergalactic bad guy decides to control the flow of information?

Questions like these are precisely why I kept my mouth shut today during New American Foundation’s event, Google UnWired, with Larry Page (co-founder of Google and President, Products) and Michael Calabrese (Director of the Wireless Future Program at New America Foundation).

Page was in DC to talk about broadband access, which he described as a human right. It’s also an issue that we have started to investigate, and one on which we have held discussions in the past. This event looked at what Calabrese described as pervasive connectivity: wireless access anytime, from anywhere, through ubiquitous networks.

Page read his read a few notes off his Blackberry before looking up at the room:

It doesn’t make sense to have Google if you don’t use it.

According to Page, Americans use only 3-5% of the total spectrum at any given time. “Spectrum’s not like water in the sense that by not using it, you’re not storing it up somewhere for future use,” he said.

There are philanthropic reasons to improve access. Page described a recent trip to Uganda, when he visited students in a trigonometry class. When he asked them if they used mobile phones, a third of their hands went up. But when he asked them how many used the Internet, the translator couldn’t even think of a word for it. They had no word for Internet.

Or, for example, the opportunity to build something distributed and decentralized to store information. Page discussed the state of phone records after Hurricane Katrina that were centralized and underwater on somebody’s ruined desktop computer. Distributed networks, by comparison, are more resilient.

There are benefits for consumers and business, including what Page described as Wi-Fi on steroids with greater range, increased speed, and open innovation.

And then there are selfish reasons to improve access. Increasing access means more people using Google.

Organizing the world’s information is a big task, but if no one is providing access, then we will step up and do it because it doesn’t make sense to organize information without access.

And this is what made me think of Dr. Who, the satellite, and organizing all of the world’s information. What’s worse than living in a world in which all the information is controlled by some alien with a hateful streak? Living in a country that is quite possibly slipping backwards in time. In recent years, the United States fell from 3rd to 15th place in the OECD’s broadband rankings.

The U.S. is eclipsed by the UK now in terms of business, and that’s probably because of broadband. They are doing a better job. No where else in the US (outside of major cities like DC) can you get a 100MB connection. Our own employees only have 1MB service. Our employees can’t build 100MB services if they only have a 1MB connection.

And it’s not just a matter of increased access. It’s also a matter of openness

We feel strongly about openness because we lived in a closed world and we didn’t like it very much as computer scientists.

What’s holding them back? Not the technology. Rather, Page suggests that regulatory issues are mostly to blame.

We can get more done by thinking about how we want to regulate it. (Page offered several solutions. You can watch them all on the event page.)

And more people will lobby to change regulation once we start purchasing better devices.

Remember the “random guy” who landed on the satellite with the Doctor and Rose? He got a better device. He had a gadget implanted in his forehead. A click of the fingers opened his mind and allowed all of the information in the world to flow in. Imagine coming back to the present day and having your brain fly open every time some clicks her fingers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Broadband, Digital Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.