It’s crazy, right? How much are you paying for Internet services now? Imagine paying absolutely nothing for connectivity to the world’s biggest repository of knowledge, cat videos, and misspelled press releases. There would be massive implications in this, but it seems like we’re far from achieving a type of connectivity that costs nothing to the consumer. Other communication services have undergone similar pipe dreams. What makes this any different? The idea is currently so radical, we couldn’t help but chime in and discuss a few things related to it.
The Cost of Internet Connectivity
As it currently stands, staying connected to the internet implies a cost to the consumer. Most of them happily pay their bills without wondering what’s behind all of those costs and why their bills are probably more expensive than in other countries.
For one example, let’s look at the U.S. On average, a consumer will pay approximately $47 per month on an Internet subscription. For that, the average stable downlink speed will be 35.2 Mbps. Most of this cost is due to the quasi-monopolies and compliance costs that make it very difficult for new ISPs to surface. The old boys fight over territory while new players will have to invest significant amounts of capital and effort to comply with the barriers to entry that have been lobbied for for decades.
In contrast, we can take countries like Romania and Singapore that don’t have such barriers and analyze the approximate cost and speed of Internet. The average stable downlink speed around in my city (Oradea, Romania) is 71.9 Mbps, which is a little bit below the national average (but not very far behind). As for cost, I pay roughly $11 per month for services. Singapore has an average speed of 119.9 Mbps at prices relatively close to the U.S. index.
This sends a message: we can make the Internet cheaper but not necessarily free.
While it’s a fantastic concept to have an Internet that can be used without any cost, I cannot emphasize enough that it costs money to run the hardware that functions as the world wide web’s backbone. To make something free, someone has to stand to gain from it.
Facebook’s Internet.Org Idea
Mark Zuckerberg has long been a proponent of Internet accessibility for people who cannot afford it, which made him create an initiative for this exact purpose called Internet.Org. Its main goal is to make it possible for people to access thirty-seven different online applications (Facebook included, of course) without having to pay a single dime. To accomplish this, the initiative plans to collaborate with different Internet service providers around the world to introduce this system into their infrastructures, absorbing all the operating expenditures so that the consumer will not have to pay for access.
The initiative sparked a controversy in India that has ledmany firms to be against collaborating with Facebook, arguing that this goes against the philosophy and spirit of net neutrality, which requires that Internet access be treated the same across the board (no one person may be restricted from using it to its fullest extent). In response to this, Zuckerberg argued that the ability to connect to a handful of apps is still better than no connectivity at all.
Can The Internet Have No Cost?
Can The Internet Have No Cost?
As long as there is a cost to running hardware, the Internet will not be free of charge. On that note, Wi-Fi seems a bit promising. Hotspots crop up wherever there are commercial establishments, and they usually provide unfettered Internet service for free. If traffic increases considerably, though, they will have to block their routers with a password to limit access to only paying clients. Other initiatives for free Internet are usually state-sponsored (like the free Wi-Fi provided by Oradea’s municipal government), although technically, I wouldn’t call that “free” since it is supported by taxpayers.
At this moment in history, there is no conceivable way for free Internet to exist universally, but there are many places where that is a reality and people are going online. In the places that it matters, such as in remote villages, connectivity is still a long way away.
What do you think will solve this problem? In the discussion about Internet.Org, do you agree with the Indian firms or Zuckerberg? Tell us in the comments!
How free will the Internet be in 2025?
Elizabeth Weise , USATODAY another point of view
SAN FRANCISCO – On the eve of Independence Day, a who's who of computer experts say that government control, consumer distrust and corporate greed threaten the future of the Internet as we know it,
In a report released Thursday, the Pew Research Center distilled the concerns of over 1,400 computer experts, Internet visionaries and researchers canvassed earlier this year. They were asked whether people will be more or less able to freely share information online in the year 2025.
Sixty-five percent said the web of the future would be more open, 35% less.
The good news is that by 2025 "every human being on the planet will be online. The collision of ideas through the sharing network will lead to explosive innovation and creativity," said filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby awards.
But the open structure that has made the Internet so powerful is under threat, say the experts.
"What the carriers actually want—badly—is to move television to the Net, and to define the Net in TV terms: as a place you go to buy content, as you do today with cable," said Doc Searls, director of Project VRM at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
That's a far cry from the heady beginnings of the Internet, when users first realized they individually had the power to reach millions of others without publishing houses, newspapers or television stations acting as intermediaries.
As the Internet becomes more commercialized, people may stop seeing it as something they can use to reach out to the world, limiting their expectations of "what the Internet is for," said David Clark, a research scientist at MIT's computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory.
The challenge is to prevent the web from becoming "just a corporate entertainment-delivery system," said Mike Roberts, a member of the Internet Hall of Fame.
Threats to 'net neutrality,' the treatment of all senders and receivers as equals, could destroy the power of individuals. The experts fear companies will instead focus on increasing revenue by sending the content of the highest bidders first, relegating those who can't pay to the slow lanes.
"The interests of everyday users count for very little," said P.J. Ray, a researcher at the University of Maryland.
Another concern is increased government regulation and censorship. Countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey have blocked Internet access to control the flow of information. China famously has its "Great Firewall" to keep unwanted news from its citizens.
"The pressure to balkanize the global Internet will continue and create new uncertainties. Governments will become more skilled at blocking access to unwelcome sites," said Paul Saffo, a futurist and professor at Stanford University.
Many worry that government and corporate surveillance will only increase. "The next few years are going to be about control," said Danah Boyd, a research scientist at Microsoft.
While governments focus on stopping dissent and terrorism, companies are concerned with extending copyright, to keep lucrative franchises like Mickey Mouse or "Gone With the Wind" from falling into the public domain.
"The dominant content companies may seek ever more rigorous ways to prevent the flow of copyright content within and across borders," said Kate Crawford, a professor of civic media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
There is a relentless push to have copyright reach "into the near-infinite past" in the words of Jeremy Epstein, a computer scientist at SRI International, a non-profit research institute in Menlo Park, Calif.
However, others argue that eventually "sharing freely will be recognized as having greater long-term economic value than strictly limited controls over intellectual property," in the words of Clark Sept, co-founder of Business Place Strategies.
Still, no less an expert than Vince Cerf, the co-inventor of the protocols that make the Internet possible, is hopeful. By 2025 governments and corporations will realize that being adaptable is important.
In the end, he said, "the Internet will become far more accessible than it is today."
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