Tyrone Greenfield '11 and Isaac Wilder '13 creating new way to distribute internet access

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."