The fundamentals haven’t been addressed at all,” Wilkinson, a London-based partner at consulting firm Oliver Wyman, said in an interview at the Hotel Morosani Schweizerhof. “The things that caused the previous crisis – loose monetary policy and trade imbalances – they’re actually bigger now than they were then.

In Egypt we’ve watched as the government, in an unprecedented way, shutoff Internet access for the entire country. We’re building a system that can’t be shutoff–it’s as decentralized as possible. You could jam the signal somewhat, but to do that at the scale of a country is a very very difficult task. The system we envision has two components: One in space and one on the ground. We’re building a very decentralized and distributed peer-to-peer mesh network. Because there is no central point you can’t turn off connectivity like they did in Egypt. That mesh network will allow people to communicate with each other locally, and if it’s needed they can switch to the satellite to connect to the outside world. We think there’s a need now to put an end to the Internet kill-switch.