First I've heard of project Loon, sounds interesting. Is anyone familiar with the FAA implications of flying "anything"? Example, I presumably can go in my back yard and launch a kite on a windy day and let it fly a few hundred feet in the air (your average kid spool will give you 500 feet). I don't attach blinking red lights to it and I don't call anyone to tell them I'm doing it. Now, what if I got a balloon and floated it above my house with a wire going down. Assume I'm able to make the balloon stay up hundreds of feet for a few weeks despite weather and the weight of the cord. Also assume non-commercial, could I legally "just do it"?
It makes a lot of sense to partner with local telcos to serve customers, but it makes it less likely that Google would be able to leverage providing this infrastructure into broader commercial advantage.
I wonder how much control Google can have over balloon routes? In the limiting case, if they had none, they would have little negotiating power, since they have the infrastructure over a country one way or another and have to deal with that country's carriers. If they have more control, they can choose how to route the balloons so they don't pay to launch balloons over countries they haven't done deals with.
It sounds like they're going to blanket certain latitudes with balloons and they'll probably just turn off the ground-facing radios when over countries where they don't have permission to operate.
