World After Capital: Access to the Internet (Informational Freedom)

NOTE: I have been posting excerpts from my book World After Capital. The previous section introduced the concept of Informational Freedom. Today looks specifically at internet access.

On occasion, the Internet has come in for derision from those who claim it is only a small innovation compared to, say, electricity or vaccinations. Yet it is not small at all. If you want to learn how electricity or vaccinations work, the Internet suddenly makes that possible for anyone, anywhere in the world. Absent artificial limitations re-imposed on it, the Internet provides the means of access to and distribution of all human knowledge—including all of history, art, music, science, and so on—to all of humanity. As such, the Internet is the crucial enabler of the digital Knowledge Loop and access to the Internet is a central aspect of Informational Freedom.

At present, over 3.5 Billion people are connected to the Internet, and we are connecting over 200 Million more every year [88]. This tremendous growth has become possible because the cost of access has fallen so dramatically. A capable smartphone costs less than $100 to manufacture, and in places with strong competition 4G bandwidth is provided at prices as low as $8 per month (this is a plan in Seoul that provides 500 MB at 4G speeds, a 2GB plan is $17 per month) [89] [90].

Even connecting people in remote places is getting much cheaper, as the cost for wireless networking is coming down and we are building more satellite capacity. For instance, there is a project underway that connects rural communities in Mexico for less than $10,000 in equipment cost per community. At the same time in highly developed economies such as the U.S., ongoing technological innovation, such as MIMO wireless technology, will further lower prices for bandwidth in dense urban areas [91].

All of this is to say that even at relatively low levels, a UBI will cover the cost of access to the Internet, provided that we keep innovating and have highly competitive and/or properly regulated access markets. This is a first example of how the three different freedoms mutually re-enforce each other: Economic Freedom allows people to access the Internet, which is the foundation for Informational Freedom.

As we work to give everyone affordable access to the Internet, we still must address other limitations to the flow of information on the Internet. In particular, we should oppose restrictions on the Internet imposed by either our governments or our Internet Service Providers (ISPs, the companies we use to get access to the Internet). Both of them have been busily imposing artificial restrictions, driven by a range of economic and policy considerations.

By design, the Internet does not include a concept of geographic regions. Most fundamentally, it constitutes a way to connect networks with one another (hence the name “Internet” or network between networks). Any geographic restrictions that exist today have been added in, often at great cost. For instance, Australia and the UK have recently built so-called “firewalls” around their countries that are not unlike the much better-known Chinese firewall. These firewalls are not cheap. It cost the Australian government about $44 million to build its geographic-based, online perimeter [92]. This is extra equipment added to the Internet that places it under government control, restricting Informational Freedom. Furthermore, as of 2017 both China and Russia have moved to block VPN (Virtual Private Network) services, a tool that allowed individuals to circumvent these artificial restrictions and censorship online [93]. As citizens, we should be outraged that our own governments are spending our money to restrict our Informational Freedom. Imagine, as an analogy, if the government in an earlier age had come out to say “we will spend more taxpayer money so that you can call fewer phone numbers in the world.”

The same additional equipment used by governments to re-impose geographic boundaries on the Internet is also used by ISPs (Internet Service Providers, i.e. companies that provide access to the Internet) to extract additional economic value from customers, in the process distorting access. These practices include paid prioritization and zero rating. To understand them better and why they are a problem, let’s take a brief technical detour.

When you buy access to the Internet, you pay for a connection of a certain capacity. Let’s say that is 10 Mbps (that is 10 Megabits per second). So if you use that connection fully for, say, sixty seconds, you would have downloaded (or uploaded for that matter) 600 Megabits, the equivalent of 15-25 songs on Spotify or SoundCloud (assuming 3-5 Megabytes per song). The fantastic thing about digital information is that all bits are the same. So it really doesn’t matter whether you used this to access Wikipedia, to check out Khan Academy, or to browse images of kittens. Your ISP should have absolutely no say in that. You have paid for the bandwidth, and you should be free to use it to access whatever parts of human knowledge you want.

That principle, however, doesn’t maximize profit for the ISP. To do so, the ISP seeks to discriminate between different types of information based on consumer demand and the supplier’s ability to pay. Again, this has nothing to do with the underlying cost of delivering those bits. How do ISPs discriminate between different kinds of data? They start by installing equipment that lets them identify bits based on their origin. They then go to a company like YouTube or Netflix and ask them to pay money to the ISP to have their traffic “prioritized,” relative to the traffic from other sources that are not paying. Another form of this manipulation is so-called “zero rating” which is common among wireless providers, where some services pay to be excluded from the monthly bandwidth cap. And if permitted, ISPs will go even a step further: in early 2017 the U.S. Senate voted to allow ISPs to sell customer data including browsing history without prior customer consent [94].

The regulatory solution to this issue goes by the technical and boring name of Net Neutrality. But what is really at stake here is Informational Freedom. Our access to human knowledge should not be skewed by the financial incentives of our ISPs. Why do we need regulation? Why not just switch to another ISP, one that provides neutral access? As it turns out in most geographic areas, especially in the United States, there is no competitive market for Internet access. ISPs either have outright monopolies (often granted by regulators) or they operate in small oligopolies. For instance, in the part of New York City (Chelsea) where I live at the moment, there is just one broadband ISP, with speeds that barely qualify as real broadband.

Over time technological advances such as wireless broadband and mesh networking may make the Internet Access market more competitive. Until then, however, we need regulation to avoid ISPs limiting our Informational Freedom. This concern is shared by people in diverse geographies. For instance, India recently objected to a plan by Facebook to provide subsidized Internet access which would have given priority to Facebook services.