In many places there's regulation that fixes electricity prices. Those fixed prices reduce the profits that electricity companies make. When electricity companies make less profits they have less money to invest into broadening their subscriber base. On the other hand the prices that cell phone companies can charge are not regulated in that way. A cell phone company can simply double it's prices if it wants to do so.
Mobile phone call prices doubling are pain in neck. Might force people to speak like telegram. Electricity prices doubling can absolutely wreck an economy. It might force businesses to close at nightfall, and it might put hospitals, and people's lives, in difficult situations. If the way prices are controlled stops the company from expanding (or otherwise fulfilling its social function), the regulation is 'inadequate', not 'excessive'. Anyway, why can't they take loans, make the locals investors, get subsidies...? All the things NGO's do.
Given that we live in a world with laws, it matters what principles we write into our laws. Laws matter. Legal rights matter.
The Spanish Constitution says every Spaniard has a right to housing/shelter, it being up to the government to decide what that means in practice. Evictions are most definitely still a thing, owners are allowed to keep perfectly viable apartments closed for the sake of maintaining prices, and, with a 24% unemployment rate (last I checked), families end up on the streets. When they try to illegally occupy said abandoned apartments, the police comes to evict them.
It also says that Freedom of Expression is guaranteed. One the one hand, it gets abused; streetwalkers have invoked that right to justify them walking "in uniform" in their designated areas, as if the way they dressed was a form of self-expression. Journalists and politicians employ it to liberally libel, slander and lie at their convenience. On the other hand, the usual police brutality problems when there are protests remain entrenched.
It also guarantees a Right to Honour and Private Life. Which is difficult to enforce at the best of times, but, in the age of the Internet, it seems laughable.
I could go on. Loftily-phrased rights matter, yes, but depending on who enforces them, on context and interested parties and circumstances, they might be meaningless, or might be abused. Principles are abused, bent, ignored, worked around, or outright violated, on a regular basis.
Legal rights only matter when they are written in concrete, clearly-worded ways, that let you know what you can do to make sure you get the thing you have a right to, and what guarantees are in place in case you don't get what you were promised. That the Consitution says I have a "Right to Life" is irrelevant if cops can Ferguson me for looking at them funny, or my health insurance can weasel out on paying for my treatment, leaving me to die. On the other hand, if the actual law guarantees that neither of these things can happen without serious consequences for the cops or the insurance respectively, and has the actual infrastructure to back this up, then yeah, that matters.
At any rate, the UN declared the Internet a human right in 2011, so, as far as they're concerned, it seems the debate is over and done with. It basically translates to "you can't cut the Internet on people just because you're at war or otherwise in trouble", apparently, rather than "you should get everyone some Internet access ASAP".
Mobile phone call prices doubling are pain in neck.
Yes. On the other hand that's the environment in which those cell phone companies flourished and provided a lot of people with cell phone coverage.
Interestingly a country like Chile banned Facebook Zero because of violation of net neutrality which is probably written in some "right to internet"-law.
At any rate, the UN declared the Internet a human right in 2011, so, as far as they're concerned, it seems the debate is over and done with.
No, one UN report said it's a human right. It was n...
Fact: the Internet is excruciatingly slow in many developing countries, especially outside of the big cities.
Fact: today's websites are designed in such a way that they become practically impossible to navigate with connections in the order of, say, 512kps. Ram below 4GB and a 7-year old CPU are also a guarantee of a terrible experience.
Fact: operating systems are usually designed in such an obsolescence-inducing way as well.
Fact: the Internet is a massive source of free-flowing information and a medium of fast, cheap communication and networking.
Conclusion: lots of humans in the developing world are missing out on the benefits of a technology that could be amazingly empowering and enlightening.
I just came across this: what would the internet 2.0 have looked like in the 1980s. This threw me back to my first forays in Linux's command shell and how enamoured I became with its responsiveness and customizability. Back then my laptop had very little autonomy, and very few classrooms had plugs, but by switching to pure command mode I could spend the entire day at school taking notes (in LaTeX) without running out. But I switched back to the GUI environment as soon as I got the chance, because navigating the internet on the likes of Lynx is a pain in the neck.
As it turns out, I'm currently going through a course on energy distribution in isolated rural areas in developing countries. It's quite a fascinating topic, because of the very tight resource margins, the dramatic impact of societal considerations, and the need to tailor the technology to the existing natural renewable resources. And yet, there's actually a profit to be made investing in these projects; if managed properly, it's win-win.
And I was thinking that, after bringing them electricity and drinkable water, it might make sense to apply a similar cost-optimizing, shoestring-budget mentality to the Internet. We already have mobile apps and mobile web standards which are built with the mindset of "let's make this smartphone's battery last as long as possible".
Even then, (well-to-do, smartphone-buying) thrid-worlders are somewhat neglected: Samsung and the like have special chains of cheap Android smartphones for Africa and the Middle East. I used to own one; "this cool app that you want to try out is not available for use on this system" were a misery I had to get used to.
It doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to do the same thing for outdated desktops. I've been in cybercafés in North Africa that still employ IBM Aptiva machines, mechanical keyboard and all—with a Linux operating system, though. Heck, I've seen town "pubs", way up in the hills, where the NES was still a big deal among the kids, not to mention old arcades—Guile's theme goes everywhere.
The logical thing to do would be to adapt a system that's less CPU intensive, mostly by toning down the graphics. A bare-bones, low-bandwith internet that would let kids worldwide read wikipedia, or classic literature, and even write fiction (by them, for them), that would let nationwide groups tweet to each other in real time, that would let people discuss projects and thoughts, converse and play, and do all of those amazing things you can do on the Internet, on a very, very tight budget, with very, very limited means. Internet is supposed to make knowledge and information free and universal. But there's an entry-level cost that most humans can't afford. I think we need to bridge that. What do you guys think?