[magicalist]

Uh, vs any other possible ISP that would provide internet access? Or is it better just to not provide access at all?

Luckily strong encryption tools are built into every browser out there by default that prevents the ISP from seeing what you're doing on the web beyond the domain you are connecting to, and there are tools like Tor that can protect you even from logging of that.

Meanwhile, how will a nation build an internet providing balloon only for itself when the wind carries those balloons around the entire planet? And the very point of the project is to provide internet where there is currently none, meaning "organizations that are under the democratic control of those nations" (making the huge assumption that any particular country we're talking about is a democracy) haven't found it economically feasible and/or desirable to provide internet in these places.

What a golden example of a "middlebrow" dismissal.

[klibertp]

IIRC those balloons stay in place, thanks to being able to change altitudes. When the wind start to blow in an undesirable direction or is too strong, the balloon can just get to the lower or higher place, where the wind is just right. That's exactly what normal balloons do and it seems to work.

Because of that I think that giving the balloons to the countries is perfectly possible - just hand them the remote for the ones above their heads.

[magicalist]

That's what I thought at first as well (the animation shows going in one direction and then rising and moving in the opposite, after all), though it seemed really optimistic that you could have enough control from different layers of wind to stay around one spot. Layers of wind move in different directions, but not often diametrically opposed (at least not near to each other vertically), and overall winds in the stratosphere move largely west to east. It seems more likely that you could do some steering with the different layers, but not anything approaching staying still. More like change your latitude very slowly. IANAMeteorologist, though.

Check out the "how loon works" video, it seems to back that up (the source article quotes it as well): http://www.google.com/loon/how/ at around 2:55

from the transcript:

> "Now we have some ability to steer in general, however, in the stratosphere, most of the time the winds actually flow from west to east. Because the winds generally circulate this way, we typically will have bands of our balloons that will be around the world at different latitudes. So if the balloons are circling around the bottom half of the world, eventually the balloon that's over South Africa will pass over South America."