Satellites and the Digital Divide

One of the methods for increasing the number of people with web access ("bridging the digital divide" if you will) was satellite internet. The New York Times conversation with Pradman Kaul was really interesting, and it brought up some interesting points, including:

• There are "probably 15 million" households in the US without access to broadband internet services. If we can't get broadband over wires to everyone in the US, I think that the problem is going to be different around the world. It just isn't feasible to lay wires to every house in the world.
• Broadcasting high demand programming over satellites means uploading once and sending to millions at once instead of downloading it millions of times. This makes a lot of sense in terms of bandwidth usage, but I don't know how it will be worked into people's already "on-demand" attitudes about web content.
  

This all reminded me an article I read from the BBC I had heard about the launching of satellites by a group called O3B networks (named after the "Other 3 Billion" people on the planet) to provide satellite internet to underserved markets in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East. The venture is funded in part by Google, and this makes me a little uneasy for two reasons:

• Every person online is another set of eyes that can look at Google advertisements. It is in their interest to get as many people online as possible. Will they be willing to accept responsibility for the social unrest that comes with the changes in communication that take place when a society takes up a new technology en masse, or are they doing something about it?
• Do we really want the owner of a lot of online content being an Internet service provider? I don't feel like it's a good idea to have the content and the service come from the same place.