If you could choose one thing from the internet to share with the world, what would it be? - Quartz

"Imagine, for a moment, a very different world. + Imagine if, suddenly, all of North America, South America, Europe, Oceania, Japan, South Korea and South Africa lost their internet access. How far back would such a loss set humanity? Those areas encompass many of our technological advancements, institutions of higher learning, and investment dollars in growth and new business. Together, they account for roughly 2.1 billion people. + But, as you read this article online, 4.3 billion people lack internet access. + So, once again, imagine a very different world. While we can contemplate the Walking Dead-esque negative shift in human growth that would take place if the plug were pulled on the places that have internet access, can we even imagine the opposite? Can we imagine the forward push we would experience if twice that number of people came online? What quantum leap forward would humanity take if, suddenly, everyone could access the information those of us with internet take for granted? Such a shift in the opposite direction would be truly monumental—and it is about to happen. + Outernet, the company I work for, announced today that it turned on a test signal from satellites that will broadcast the information from the internet to the entire world, for free. During the test phase, that information will be broadcast from existing geostationary satellites to a few regions (North America and Europe, Middle East, North Africa, which was decided via vote) and accessible via user-built receivers that can be assembled using widely available, cheap components. The receivers will then broadcast the information over a Wi-Fi signal to any Wi-Fi enabled device, creating an 'offline internet' of the content the receiver has collected and continues to collect. Outernet encourages users to innovate in creating the best and cheapest receivers possible, even to potentially create businesses around building and selling them locally. + To understand how it works, think of a radio signal from space sending BitTorrent files, which assemble one complete file from multiple users. In the case of Outernet, those multiple users are the multiple overhead passes of a satellite or multiple satellites. Once a user has a receiver, they will receive a constant stream of data that will be assembled into files on their local device (the BitTorrent side). They will receive the entire stream of data and the user can keep what they want. So, if for example you decide you only want content in Hindi, you will still receive the universal signal for all files in every language but your device will ignore non-Hindi files. In 2015, Outernet will broadcast from its own fleet of Low Earth Orbit cubesats to the entire globe and the signal will be even easier to access. + That signal will be a one way broadcast of data from the internet. It won’t quite be the internet—which is a means for two-way communication—but Outernet will allow for the benefits of information access to be consumed unidirectionally. Essentially, this amounts to the construction of an enormous free digital library. Which leads to an important question: when all one can do is listen, who decides what is said? Who stocks the shelves of this library? ..."