Alain Armand - How Google Can Change Haiti Forever
Google is currently in the process of publicly selecting towns in which to launch Google Fiber, a service that brings ultra-fast internet to remote, rural locations. It's an experiment to see how it can change the user experience and provide applications not yet possible on today's networks. With this, Google is disrupting the market again. Comcast, Bellsouth and everyone else will have to step up their game or get out of it. Google's experiment might cost it half a billion dollars, but that's probably a good investment for the return they will get in research and development and in pushing the general market to higher speeds to access its not yet existent services.
What if the Google Foundation or Google Inc decided to have this same kind of experiment in Haiti? Pick a city like Port-au-Prince or Cap-Haitian and deploy the fastest internet the world has seen. Haiti has a huge development gap when it comes to communications. Cellular really opened up only recently when Digicel was able to get into the market by playing the game of politics and business in Haiti. That quite literally blew the market wide open. Everyone was forced to compete and prices came down for minutes and phones.
If Google were to assume the cost of building out this super fast internet system in Haiti, it would open Haiti up to all types of social and business possibilities. It could be a French call center destination, business could be done much more efficiently for everyone. Information would flow out of Haiti much more quickly thereby demanding more accountability from everyone who used to hide in the darkness and deafness of no information and misinformation in Haiti. We could have Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur language classes running on servers so that students could learn languages and provide telephone support in multiple languages. Haitians are very good at learning languages. This could expand to online classes and universities providing services and degrees. The truth is we don't know what will happen. Or maybe we do. What has happened to every society in which information flow has been added? It has flourished, blossomed and transformed. The telegraph and telephone landline worked wonders every where it went as does the cell phone now. What will super fast internet do? Will businesses come to Haiti to set up shop? Will there be a comparative advantage for server companies and internet infrastructure companies? I think the answer is clear.
Google is pulling out of China because it refuses to censor its search engine. By pulling out its services, which were relied on by 38% of the market there, and refusing to play by the rules the Chinese government laid out, they are shaking things up. This move will cost Google $600M in the first year, but it's a cost they're willing to bear. In the cell phone market, while companies like Microsoft sell operating systems, Google gives its away with the hope that it will make up for the cost in ad revenue. While Apple produces products that require service through specific telecom companies that usually require 2-year contracts, Google's Nexus One can be purchased 'unlocked,' eliminating the necessity for reliance on these notoriously monopolistic companies. So it seems Google understands the value of disruption — which is exactly what Haiti could use right now.
The fiber optic cable that will connect Haiti to rest of the world at broadband speed is already in Port-au-Prince. Political shenanigans in Haiti are preventing it from operating. Google can make a social experiment out of dropping millions of terabytes into Haiti for the foreseeable future. Google should trade China for Haiti and demonstrate the power of free information in developing countries. Let Google disrupt underdevelopment like it disrupts every other market it enters.
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