GOOGLE X

Intro: The addition of drones to Google’s robot army marks the outbreak of aerial combat in its battle for global internet supremacy

The internet giant Google has purchased a company that develops military-style drones in a controversial £36million deal.

Titan Aerospace makes unmanned aircraft that run on solar power and can remain airborne for five years at a time.

Google claims the technology will provide internet access to remote corners of the world. But the move has provoked privacy concerns over the internet company’s ability to snoop on people from great heights. The drones fly at 65,000ft – almost twice as high as passenger planes.

Because the drones are solar powered and always above the clouds they do not need to land to refuel, so the drones are able to cover up to 3million miles before needing to land for maintenance.

However, critics have raised fears over the company’s newly-acquired powers of mass global surveillance. Titan is merely the latest addition to its growing arsenal of robotics firms, and Google is highly secretive about its technological ambitions – all of its projects are run by a closely-guarded division mysteriously known as ‘Google X’.

A spokesperson for Big Brother Watch, a privacy campaign group, said:

… The regulation of drones is something that urgently needs addressing. Given Google’s track record is littered with overstepping the line and infringing people’s privacy, combining their hunger for data with drone technology is a mind boggling proposition.

COMMENT & ANALYSIS

Google’s multi-million dollar bid for a company that makes solar-powered drone aircraft marks the outbreak of aerial combat in its battle with Facebook for global internet supremacy.

The search engine giant has bought Titan Aerospace, a New Mexico start-up that previously caught the eye of Mark Zuckerberg, for an undisclosed price thought to be in the region of £36m ($60m).

Zuckerberg opted instead to snap up Ascenta, a tiny British engineering company based in rural Somerset – which is also working on solar-powered drones – for $20m.

The deals take both companies, which are dabbling in areas such as robots, driverless cars and contact lens cameras, even further into the realms of science fiction.

Despite mounting fears on stock markets over the bursting of a new tech bubble, in similar style to the early 2000s dotcom boom and bust, the Californian colossi remain ready to pay millions of pounds of investors’ money on futuristic technology.

Why, though, some may ask, the sudden interest in aviation? The answer is that Google and Facebook are vying to gain a stranglehold on potentially lucrative new online markets as some of the world’s poorest countries begin to be connected to the internet. Laying cables in the ground, they reckon, will take too long and cost too much, so they are trying to beam out signals from on high instead.

In their eyes, this is an altruistic enterprise, giving poor people cheap access to the internet. The drones, it is claimed, could also provide invaluable data on climate change, environmental damage and natural disasters. Google is excited in welcoming Titan Aerospace to the ‘Google family’.

Behind the gushing, however, critics perceive this new bonding as a highly dysfunctional one. The Titan deal is certain to ignite fresh fears over the internet giants’ power to pry into every aspect of people’s lives once they are equipped with robotic aircraft that can conduct surveillance from a high altitude.

It will also raise further questions among investors who are growing increasingly sceptical of tech stocks. Splashing millions on Titan, even though the company’s drones are still at the prototype stage, will be grist to the mill for the doubters. Eyebrows were previously raised following Google’s takeover of robotics company Boston Dynamics.

Facebook, for its part, has come under fire for its recent acquisition of WhatsApp in a $19bn deal, and its $2bn purchase of Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset maker.

Google’s takeover of Titan promises to put at its disposal a swarm of dragonfly-shaped planes that can encircle the globe, staying aloft for up to five years, without ever having to refuel, since they are run on power generated by sunlight.

Titan’s Solara 60 drone has a 60 metre wingspan and is covered in around 3,000 solar panels generating electricity to power its flight. Its cruising speed is around 65mph and it has a range of more than 2.8miles.

The Solara 60 and another model, the smaller Solara 50, is a prototype but commercial versions are expected to be delivered next year.

The lightweight aircraft will be deployed as part of Google’s ‘Project Loon’. The name refers to balloons, rather than lunacy, but the idea stemmed from Google’s launching in 2013 of a number of large, high altitude balloons over the Southern Hemisphere to transmit internet signals.

The company’s growing robotic arsenal includes the sinister-looking Atlas, one of the terrifying looking robots acquired in the takeover of Boston Dynamics, a military manufacturer that produces animal-like and humanoid machines for the battlefield.

Google’s founders, Page and Sergey Brin, claim their mission is ‘to organise the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful’, which sounds innocuous enough.

Yet the very idea of two young billionaires who invented a clever algorithm and went on to command their own robot army and a fleet of drones would, until recently, have sounded like the tale of a Bond villain.

Still, to many, the prospect will be more than a little disquieting.