Why Free, Publicly Owned, Publicly Run, Municipal Wifi Is Required for Equal Internet Access for All (And Why It Will Never Happen)
When people say that access to the Internet is a right, this is wrong. A commercial product, or
service cannot be a right. The Internet may seem like a big open environment, but it is a commercial entity from end
to end. ISPs charge for access, and you can’t get
online—anywhere—without a commercial Internet provider being involved in the ‘last-mile’ part of your
connection. Even if the access is free, like a public library, the library (or government) still pays the ISP.
Saying that smoking is a right is an offence to everybody in the world who struggles to receive their basic right to
an education and freedom from oppression. If someone has the sheer privileged luxury to afford cigarettes (and the
sheer stupidity to smoke them), then that is their choice. It is not a right—something that you have to have even
if you don’t like it. Kids don’t like education, but it’s a right. Rights are not opt-in.
This is where the Internet comes in. The Internet can be an education tool, and can facilitate
freedom, and therefore is seen as a necessary right for the future.
However, the lack of free, publicly owned, publicly run, municipal wifi prevents Internet access being a right,
rather than a privilege. This breaks down to three main areas of issue:
1. Commercial Interests Are Not in the Interest of the Public
All commercial companies exist firstly to make profit. Any altruistic character in a company is even without
intention a form of marketing. Cynical? Yes; but also true. A commercial entity can do no good if it does not
first ensure that it continues to exist. And rather than continuing to exist
being a secondary consideration,
it is in most cases pursued to the detriment of everything else. Does a company like Shell say that $4 Billion
profit is enough, and they should perhaps—instead of damaging the planet—change business to something more
constructive? No. The shareholders must be pleased.
It’s this line of thinking, that the impossible must continually be achieved in order to appease ‘the
shareholders’, that can permeate every branch of a business.
When decisions are made—at every level of business—to please shareholders, decisions tend to go against
openness, freedom and public benefit. It is why we have proprietary technologies and software. Digital Rights
Management. Laws against the public modifying or reverse-engineering the items they purchase. Copyright laws. Vendor
lock-in. Annoyances, such as DVD regions and mobile phone locking and least-not rootkits on audio CDs.
These restrictions are put in place to ensure that profitability is maintained. That’s perfectly fair, given the
primary goal of any company; they must protect their R&D investments and always strive to have new products that
are ahead of the curve. They could not achieve that if they gave away all of their investments to the public domain.
How are students to build the next set of tools for the future, when they are not allowed to know how the tools they
are given to use were made?
This is one of the things that is so special about the World Wide Web. Armed with a text editor, you can create the
next Twitter, or next world-changing web-app. You don’t require education and tools that are only accessible when
you have an employer with enough cash to let you join that club. Whilst you may not have the financial advantage on
your own, even Notepad is a tool you can use to take on the biggest corporations. Where else does an individual have
that level of freedom with their tools?
One example of commercial interest foregoing public interest is in the case of Netscape. At the release of Netscape
7, AOL did not include pop-up
blocking in Netscape, despite the open-source Mozilla suite (from which Netscape is produced) having this
feature. Backlash from reviewers forced AOL to release an update: Netscape 7.01, including “pop-up suppressor”.
The problem? AOL ’Web properties including Netscape.com relied upon pop-ups for revenue, thus AOL’s sites were
on the pop-up whitelist by default—Netscape.com was the default homepage.
A publicly owned, publicly run, non-profit ISP—whilst not being perfect—would not make decisions that directly
conflicted with public interests when it came to providing Internet access. The French ‘three-strikes’ rule
would not be able to stand given public pressure over a service which they themselves own and operate.
A non-profit ISP would think less about ‘customers’ and retention rates, and more about how the existing service
can be improved. A commercial ISP will not lay the lines out to remote areas unless it is eventually profitable. A
public ISP would have to, on the basis of equal access for all.
2. Access Requires an Account
There is this notion that we will all soon be computing ‘in the cloud’. Storing our data online, and accessing
and manipulating it through browser-based web-apps; even perhaps that the boundary between the desktop and the
browser will break down and we will have an always-online desktop-manager with all of our data and apps stored in
the cloud and streamed to us.
The reason this will never happen is that it will never be possible to assure that a computer is always online
without free, municipal wifi access being ubiquitous.
Since it is not possible to buy a new computer, open it for the first time, and it straight-away be online without
any configuration; software developers will always have to design and create to cater for configuring a connection
and the machine being in an offline state. This fact is a big problem: To get online you must have an account with
an ISP.
Unless we are going to migrate to only ever computing in coffee shops (and they need an account with an ISP too),
the Internet requires that you have some kind of account with some company which you must authenticate with.
How can the next generation of always-online software be designed and developed if, for example, every child in
Africa needs to sign up for an account with an ISP? If Internet access always requires a contract, then operating
systems will not be able to be designed with the assumption they are always online, and never be able to
move beyond traditional offline computing.
This comes back to the Netscape / AOL problem; how can ISPs let everybody access the Internet free and without an
account? They would have nobody to bill, and therefore would have to take action against the public interest to fund
this setup (collecting and selling aggregated traffic data, for example).
The proliferation of 3G wireless broadband only worsens the access problem. Internet providers have been so utterly
lax and unmotivated in providing nation-wide Wifi access (because frankly there’s no money in it), that they’ve
instead moved their interests to highly
profitable 3G access.
Now, instead of open and free wifi access, everybody is walking around paying for their own individual, over-priced,
over-restricted network connection which, despite you paying for your own way, still slows down with more people on
3G around you.
The carriers won! Free municipal wifi is dead.
Overpriced, over-restricted 3G is the new wifi.
Kroc Camen
The current 3G network and how you pay to access it is a massive step backwards away from the
Internet as a right. You must sign a contract with a 3G provider, undergo a credit check and pay exorbitant prices
with massive fines for going over the “unlimited” limit.
How—if this model is to be applied to Internet as a right—are children going to educate themselves if their
Internet access is so restricted and that they have to depend on their parents being able to afford access in the
first place?
3. Brands Are a Barrier to Transparency
The third reason why commercial Internet Service Providers hinder the Internet as a right, is that no commercial
Internet provider actually wants the job that they have. Internet Service Providers are brands. They must assert
their brand at all opportunities in order to drum up sales.
Would you, for example, expect the labels on a drinks bottle to have a logo on it for the
company who made the UV lamps that cured the ink on that
label? No, and as it should be with ISPs too. Internet providers should not be brands that have to combat other
brands. They are a service, not a product.
ISPs do not like being marginalised into what they really are: a wire. A cable I use to connect to the Internet.
Network infrastructure—a thankless and behind-the-scenes job.
ISPs:
I pay you to put a cable in my house, and let me send things up and down it; no more. I don’t want your
useless anti-virus products. I don’t want your “Desktop Help” applications. I don’t want your tray
icons. I don’t want your proprietary browsers. I don’t want an e-mail address with you. I don’t want
your website as my home page (including a
Google
search that only shows adverts).
Kroc Camen: A List of People Who Need to Stop Writing Software
Internet access for all should not rely on a brand being popular and being continually asserted. A publicly funded
ISP would be more concerned about how to reach more people than trying to tie the users into their proprietary
and pointless software, or whatever other backroom deals they’ve been doing (read:
BT-Yahoo).
Commercial ISPs in competition with each other have over-sold their network capacity on the basis that most people
only use a fraction of the bandwidth they sign up for. P2P has changed that
forever. Now that people are using the bandwidth they were sold, legal wrangles have had to be put in place so that
their “unlimited” packages are so limited that it’s not actually possible to
use the speed
advertised as sold. This has gone to the
point where an 8 Mb connection can be capped as low as 900
Kb/s.
Whilst a public ISP would also have to manage network capacity, with no advertising costs and the public interest in
mind more could be spent on infrastructure as well as putting in place fairer and democratic handling of bandwidth
limits.
In Summary
Internet access should:
- Non-discriminatory based on location, financial or social status
- Not require a signed contract, credit check or other personal identification of status and right
- Not require an account with a company in order to get online
- Cost nothing to those who can’t pay for it
- Not be individualised (3G), but instead municipal (WiFi)
- Not depend upon the success of a brand
And why will this never happen? Because like the banking system, our society is founded on the principles of money
exchange and therefore currently existing commercial entities cannot be simply swept to the side for the purpose of
implementing something better. The only way commercial ISPs will go away is if all of them all go bankrupt at the
same time.
There are many more complications and finer details involved, not least funding. The U.K. has
just announced a 50p
tax on phone lines to pay for improvements to the network to provide ‘universal access to broadband by 2012’¹.
This is at least, a first step.
As for the actual hardware for people to access the Internet as a right, that is another problem to discuss another
day.