Harpers | Isaac Wilder opens a black steel cabinet
on the twenty-sixth floor of Oak Tower in downtown Kansas City and
shows me what he hopes will be the future of the Internet. “This is the
router,” he says, pointing to a box the size of a DVD player. “The
ethernet cable runs out here, up through the floor, to a dish that’s
beaming a signal out to the Rosedale Ridge housing project.
There’s . . . 400-plus people, who have access to the Internet for the
first time, in their homes at least.”
A local nonprofit, Connecting for Good, pays the monthly $125 bill
for the entire housing project. This comes out to roughly $9 per year
per housing unit — a far cry from the $70 a month that these same
families would spend for the new high-speed fiber optic service Google
is currently rolling out in Kansas City, which I wrote about for the April issue of Harper’s Magazine. It’s even cheaper than the slower service Google is offering, which costs $300 for seven years of guaranteed access.[*]
And that’s the point. Wilder and his organization, the Free Network
Foundation, have come here to wage war with Google, which recently cut a
widely-publicized deal to bring the city a next-generation fiber optic
network, and which turned down Connecting for Good’s proposal to allow
multiple low-income families to share a single Google Fiber connection.
It’s clearly going to be a guerilla campaign. Wilder, twenty-two, is a
college dropout who wears stained Carhartt jeans and sports a thick
strawberry-blond beard that seems better suited to a trapper than to an
Internet pioneer.
“The one clear rule,” Wilder says of FNF’s philosophy, “is that the
Internet should be treated as a commons, the same way that we treat our
sidewalks or our air or our water. Everybody’s got a right to use it on
the same terms.”
To do this, the foundation advocates the use of decentralized “mesh”
networks that rely on microwave dishes to distribute a powerful wireless
Internet connection. Wilder calls these dish-and-router assemblies
FreedomLinks. Community groups can pool their resources, buy equipment
to receive the signal, and distribute it to their residents. Because
mesh networks share their signal and bypass the capital expense of
installing copper or fiber-optic cable, they’re much cheaper than buying
access from corporate providers like Google or Time Warner.
Wilder and his partner, Tyrone Greenfield, first set up a mesh
network at New York City’s Zuccotti Park, to give Occupy Wall Street
protesters access to the Internet. To Wilder and Greenfield, the Google
Fiber project illustrates the dangers of letting private companies
control digital access. Google might claim to be interested in
expanding Internet access to the poor, but its real goal is to monetize
the data their network can collect from its users. As proof, Wilder
cites the terms of Google’s contract with both Kansas City, Kansas, and
Kansas City, Missouri. “You can’t hook your own server up to Google
Fiber,” he says. “So if you do want to publish something, the easiest
choice is going to be through Google’s own services. This creates a sort
of locked-in environment where somebody is using a piece of Google
hardware, on a Google network, using Google services. You know every
detail of their habits. Every detail of what they’re reading.”
