Google’s Loon Failure Raised an Awkward Question

A decade ago, less than a third of the people in developing regions had access to fast mobile internet connections. This “coverage gap,” as it came to be known, was a worrisome phenomenon, especially to governments keen to compete in the knowledge economy and tech companies eager to profit from it. So in 2013, Alphabet Inc.’s Google announced Loon, a “moonshot” project to provide internet to rural and remote regions using high-altitude balloons.

Seven years later, 93% of the planet has access to mobile internet, which sounds like a huge success. Yet Loon announced in January that it was shutting down. What happened?

From the start, challenges abounded for the project, including significant technical hurdles and the emergence of other, competing means of providing mobile internet. But ultimately, Loon didn’t take off because Alphabet failed to recognize that socioeconomic problems — including illiteracy, the cost of data and handsets, and discrimination — would play a bigger role in keeping people off the internet than a lack of cell towers.

Back in 2010, Google’s founders announced an R&D arm, called Google X, that would aim to make the world a “radically better place.” Expanding internet access to those who don’t have it was a problem that fit well into the portfolio. The impediments, as Loon saw it, were primarily low-tech — “jungles, archipelagos, mountains” — and thus well-suited to its innovations.

The result was a far-out Wi-Fi network flown on high-altitude, AI-controlled, tennis-court-sized balloons. Astro Teller, the “captain of moonshots” at the company, gave it a 1% or 2% chance of success initially. But for cash-flush Google, the potential payoff was worth the risk. Success would achieve a social good (universal internet access) and lead to a profitable new business. In 2017 Loon provided emergency connectivity to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, and in 2020 it began offering 4G-speed connections to a remote segment of Kenya.

The latter was an impressive achievement, but it came much too late. Over the past decade, mobile broadband access has expanded rapidly across emerging markets, reducing costs. But even as the coverage gap narrowed, a persistent “usage gap” remained. According to GSMA, the global trade association for mobile network providers, there are still some 3.4 billion people living in an area with a mobile broadband network who aren’t using any mobile internet.