Hello friends! Some of you may know that I am a ham radio operator, in fact trained as an Emergency Communicator (EC) in the glorious state of California, where I spent many weekends and evenings in training, listening to lectures, schmoozing, and otherwise hanging around with some of the most amazing engineers in the world. Silicon Valley is the best place to be a ham. And I was proud to be trained and ready to help as part of an EC team if necessary.
Fast forward a decade+ or so and I found the following fascinating Google Tech Talk from 2013 about how Google is positioning themselves to be the most powerful emergency responder in the world, WOW, and how they will use internet bandwidth during emergencies to get critical information through when needed.
You can be sure their system will eventually be determined to be a more valuable use of bandwidth anything civilian, such as packet or digital radio, and that their internet-wide technologies are more efficient and robust than any civilian ham radio efforts can ever be.
You can be sure DARPA is funding this research arm of Google and also that gov't will be able to determine what information goes through in an emergency, and which geopolitical areas get priority.
Google has a damn good system set up, no denying it, backed by a huge and powerful infrastructure which is resistant to outages and is pretty much impenetrable. Large amounts of emergency bandwidth will be allocated to them and away from public use when deemed necessary by government..
Their communications project is extremely well-done. A high level of government funding helped them get there. My geek bump thinks this is utterly fabulous. Alas, the implications of their success to society is dreadful. It is pushing out civilian contributions, and thus further disempowering citizens. It is taking the power of communication out of our hands. The government and large corporations do not always know best, even when informed by technology and AI, even when really cool, no no nope.
