Big Tech’s connectivity moonshots largely failed as businesses

Evidence

The reality was less inspiring. Facebook’s first test flight of Aquila ended in a crash, despite claims to The Verge of a successful landing. Months later, a SpaceX rocket carrying an internet.org satellite exploded on the launchpad. By 2018, Facebook had quietly abandoned Aquila, following Google’s decision to shut down its own drone aircraft experiment, Project Titan. Project Loon worked very well as science but not as a business. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, closed it in 2021. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 498

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Big Tech turned workers into cloud proles and everyone else into cloud serfs.