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 no decision of the general UN assembly or an international treaty. UN reports don't bind anybody.
We live in a world where the IMF and the WTO use their power to get countries to follow the Washington Consensus. That means deregulation, little subsidies and private ownership of infrastructure.
There are conflicts where a country wants to regulate something and the IMF says: "If you regulate this, you won't get anymore credits from us." If a country can say: "We have to regulate this, because our people have a right to X", that means that the IMF has no business blocking the regulation.
In that background the US and Europe block UN resolutions that call for a human right to water while African nations want such a right.
Lawsuits in Investor-State-Settlement disputes can be influenced by such rights.
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's a naive view. In the real world laws have complex effects and often have effects even if the average person doesn't know how the law works. Just because a law doesn't do what you want it to do doesn't mean that the law has no effects.
Anyway, why can't they take loans, make the locals investors, get subsidies...? All the things NGO's do.
It seems like the process isn't efficient enough for businesses to invest substantial resources into it.
In general we have found in the West that profit driven-companies are often more effective at providing services as effectively as possible than NGO's.
The basic question is: "How much utility does a village get by having electricity? How much does it cost to provide electricity to the village?" If there no regulation and the village gets more utility than the cost there's a business opportunity. It's possible to make money by charging the inhabitants of the village a bit more money than it costs you to provide them with electricity.
Cell phone companies by en large operate on that model in the third world. Most electricity companies can't because they face more regulation.
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.
Given that EU law doesn't allow anybody to simply subvention business having a law that provides a right to housing can give the Spanish government the right to provide subventioned housing to it's citizens. That matters. It matters whether or not something is up to your local government or isn't.
In general we have found in the West that profit driven-companies are often more effective at providing services as effectively as possible than NGO's.
[citation needed], but I'm willing to go with whatever works best for the end user in the long term.
And, again, it's not a matter of "more" regulation so much as it is one of badly-designed regulation that doesn't get the job done.
As for the "rights" discussion, I'm beginning to see where you're coming from. Rights are bizarre, rhetorical tools, bargaining chips in the economics of pr...
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?