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ChristianKl comments on A website standard that is affordable to the poorest demographics in developing countries? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Given how things in the third world look desktop doesn't seem to be the prime way to access the internet. Smartphones are much more promising.
If you don't have the bandwidth for images it's already possible to shut them down. You can use Wikipedia on low bandwidth.
As far as reading classical literature I doubt that the average child in North Africa has a desire to read classical literature. That child likely has a lot more pressing needs. It likely wouldn't even have the idea in the first place.
Internet is not only about technology but also a lot about culture. You can't simply look at what's nice for Westerners and then believe that the same thing will work in North Africa.
Using cell phone minutes as currency is for example an important feature in some countries with don't have good banking systems. In the West we don't use the technology that way.
It's possible that someone manages to program a Ripple based system that works better than trading cell phone minutes but that's not trival.
I don't think of this as "what would be nice for Westerners", I think of this as "what would have been nice for me, back when I was a kid, if I had known what I was missing out on". I may not know what the specific social norms or economic circusmtances of people from even a few hunderd km away from my hometown were (tribes in my country are insular like that), but I think I have a pretty firm grasp on what young nerds have always wanted throughout history and regardless of the culture they were born in, whenever they were given the chance.
(To give an example: If you took a bunch of normal people and gave them too much free time and wealth, and gathered them at a party, you woudn't get Plato's Symposium. You'd get the sort of lame party that's described in The Great Gatsby. Regardless of specific cultural or economical circumstances, It takes a special kind of mind to have a blast making stories up and speculating on the cosmos the way those folks had, and then to go and write that stuff down. And that special kind of mind pops up every where, and every time, as soon as you give them the chance to bloom. If you give them no resources whatsoever, they'll still go and, say, make up an epic poem or a creation myth or whatever. Minds that blaze will find something to burn, given even the slightest chance.)
We want to learn stuff, we want to read books, we want to talk about the books we read, we want to spin our own stories. We want to learn skills, build things, dream about distant lands and eras. We want to speculate about the meaning of life, and ask "why" at stuff until the whys run out.
We see the society we're in, the way people live, and some of it doesn't make sense, and some of it doesn't seem fair, and we want to do something about it, improve stuff, solve problems, or at least understand why things are the way they are. There's only so much we can get out of reading the Qur'an or asking our elders. Eventually we feel the need to ask further questions. And we want a space to discuss them with other people who care, other people like us.
Whenever EY references classic sci-fi literature, I feel envious because before I went to study in Europe I had only been able to get my hands on a couple of Asimov and Radbury books, despite how much I relished the stuff.
Plus, if we're the one clever boy in the village (heck, the one anything in the village), it's alienating, isolating. Why am I different? What's wrong with me? The Internet can help you find that you're not alone. That, no matter how unique your tastes or ideas or experiences, there are thousands, millions out there, who thought like you. This might be especially relieving to LGBT folks, and to people who aren't satisfied with their assigned roles in life (such as gender roles in sexist societies).
It also opens your opportunities. Again, the clever boy would become, say, the Witchdoctor's (or Curate's, or Imam's) apprentice, because that's what you were expected to do.
With the Internet, you don't need to move to the big city to get a good education, leaving your family alone, perhaps draining them dry. Your town school doesn't need to buy the books to make up a decent library. Heck, you may even not need to walk ten kilometers in the wilderness at the crack of dawn every morning just to go to the underpaid, ignorant schoolmaster's tiny classroom (who may or may not spare the rod).
But the Internet isn't just a path to bringing the Gospel of Western Civilization down to the poor isolated folksies. It's also a way for the folksies to communicate with each other, to gain visibility, to speak up for themselves, to tell their own stories in their own words, to document themselves.
The Internet is a tool of self-empowerment. And I believe it should be a human right, as much as clean water, warm homes, and lighting at night.
A Western kid has a lot more unscheduled free time than a kid in a town that lives on average on 1$ per day. It has already learnt reading and writing in school. The kid also likely can't speak English.
Clever as in two standard derivation higher IQ as the others in the village might also mean IQ of 110 in that village instead of IQ of 130. IQ might very well be a biased metric and there might be cultural reasons for scoring low on the test but people with lower IQ while have a harder time to figure out how to use a command line interface of a computer to subscribe to some mailing list on which they want to chat.
That's a quite interesting claim. Part of what the debate about a human right to clean water is about, is whether it's the job of the government and the government should regulate it.
Cell phones companies in Africa don't face much regulation which allowed them to give people who don't have access to electricity because of overregulation access to cell phone coverage.
Not regulating the sector and simply let those companies provide more services and trust that Moore's law makes computers cheaper might be more promising than to start to declare internet a human right and let it be subject to heavy regulation.
I've been giving some thought to your "official rights to X result in governments taking ineffectual measures that result in people not getting X". I think it can be argued that if the measures stop people from getting X, they are vulnerating people's rights to get X in the first place, and are therefore "illegal". Does that make sense?
I also consulted my brother on this, who actually studies Law. His answer amounted to a very harried "It's a fracking mess. only experts can 'sort of' make sense of it."
... A thought just occurred to me. Just thinking out loud here. Do "fundamental rights" matter in the same way that religious dogma does? I mean, do they operate in a similar way, in terms of their tangible consequences on people's daily lives? Ecclesiastical Law. International Law. The Vatican. The UN. Dogma. Inarguable principles. Doctrine. Rampant hypocrisy and yet immense respect and authority. Saint vs. Merchant interactions.
Maybe I'm missing a vital difference, but the more I'm thinking about this, the more there seems to be a parallel of sorts...
Fundamental rights work, and are consistent, as long as one sticks to the so called negative rights or "first generation" rights, e.g., free speech, right to life, right to no arrest without a fair trial, etc.
For example a negative "right to internet access" simply means that the government can't bad you from using the internet, i.e., laws like this would be a violation. Neither it, nor anyone else, is actually obliged to provide you with a computer or any kind of ISP.
There are many ways to abuse and hurt your clients when you are a private business (especially a big, powerful one versus small, isolated, impoverished populations), but this is also true of a corrupt, uncaring, incompetent or oppressive government. It is also true that there needs to be a normalized, systematic way of sorting these problems and right any wrongs that might arise, but, again, any sort of normative (legislative?), deliberative (judiciary?), and enforcing (executive) organization is liable to be, again, corrupt, uncaring, incompetent, oppressive, etc.
Debating these things in principle seems rather pointless. The correct answer is "whatever gets the job done". Saying "people have a right to X" is simply a lofty way of saying "it's very important and urgent that people get X".
What seems obvious is that it's not a matter of over-regulation or under-regulation (how does one quantify regulation anyway? what qualifies as "just regulated enough"?), but rather of well-thought-out regulation versus ill-conceived one. This is highly dependent on who's doing the regulating, their competence, the means at their disposal, what they actually want to optimize the regulations for (government empowerment? private profit? helping some specific clients, cronies, sponsors? impeding access to the service while appearing to provide it? there are so many possibilities of betrayal... the interests of the end users might not come up at all in their calculations), who gets to enforce the regulations and the means put at their disposal to do so, and so on and so forth.
That feels like a bit of a non-sequitur. Declaring that people are entitled to something results in people not getting that something?
This also seems strange; all the cooperation projects I'm working on are NGO-based and the electricity is locally-generated, and often locally-owned. The reason the national electric network doesn't get there is that the villages are too distant and isolated, and the houses are too dispersed from each other, for the investment to be worthwhile.
How would deregulation help? By allowing thinner cables that employ less copper or aluminium? By letting cables hang lower? I'm genuinely curious.
At any rate, "regulation" of some sort and to some degree is inherent to the Internet. It's a world that lives and breathes protocols, standards, documentation, and proper procedure. There's also a lot of room for decentralization and improvisation, but there will always be a need for rules of some sort, whether the investors are private or public, foreign or local, big or small, if only as a reference point of what to do when something goes wrong.
That's a very naive view. Laws matter. Legal rights matter.
Given that we live in a world with laws, it matters what principles we write into our laws.
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.
At the heart of the internet is working anarchy. Different standards get proposed and some standards get adopted. ISO or the W3C have no power to enforce regulation.
If you look at the way this forum lists the time stamp of posts it violates the ISO standard. There are no sanctions for doing 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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 pricelessness and compromise. I'll admit, subtleties of this kind baffle me. As an engineer, I tend to think in more immediate terms, and, from the ground, all those words about rights sound like little more than well-wishing, and I use them as such.
At any rate, you seem to suggest that the fact that declaring things as rights giving States the power to defy the IMF and WTO's orders is a bad thing, which confuses me. Last time I heard, every country that attempted to apply the IMF's recommendations faced economic and social disaster; their ideas are reputedly naive at best and malicious at worst.
No, rights are (or should be) based on time-tested ethical injunctions. Granted today there is an unfortunate tendency for bodies like the UN to invent (and "de-sanctify") rights at the drop of a hat. This is undesirable behavior and should be met with mockery and derision.
Could you expound on that "time-tested ethical injunctions" thing? I understand the concepts separately, but not how they go together, nor how they relate to "rights" as in "La Déclaration des Droits de L'Homme et du Citoyen", the "Bill of Rights", or the "UN Declaration of Human Rights".
In general I'm able to speak about political matters and effects of policies without immediate judgement. When trying to understand complex political systems it helps to first focus on understanding and leave out judgements as good or bad.
The discussion about right to water is about roles of states and to what extend you have profit maximizing corporations in control of the water supply. It's a complex debate with good arguments on both sides. Policy debates shouldn't not appear one-sided.
When thinking about internet distribution the key question is whether the cell phone companies that currently provide it in Africa do enough to increase subscriber base. If you think they are doing a good job, then moving the responsibility for internet from markets to states isn't useful. If you believe that the cell phone companies are doing a poor job, then it makes a lot more sense to support ways to instead make states responsible for it.
In the EU I want to have strong net neutrality laws. I would appreciate EU legislation that makes me use my German mobile phone contract in France without roaming charges.
On the other hand I have no problem with lax net neutrality laws that would allow a service like facebook zero in Chile where facebook zero means that people who otherwise would have no access to internet at least have access to facebook.
On a further note third world countries often are corrupt which makes regulations less efficient than they could be in a perfect world. A Western company who invests wants to have some protection against the local government just coming in and forcing the Western company to provide their service for less money because the population has a right to that service.
Note, however, that first-world countries are often corrupt as well, the balance of powers is just different. And it's not just Western companies who invest, and who want to avoid the government getting in their way.
Well India is the standard IMF success story.
Ok, now your turn: can you provide an example of a country where applying IMF recommendations resulted in more "economic and social disaster" then the country was already in before the IMF got involved.
Here's a quick-and-dirty first things I found. Checking out peer-reviewed papers and other primary sources will take me a little more time.
If there are no rights, there is not need for compromises or negotiation -- the bigger stick always wins. Why should I trade with you if I can just take?
Because that would lead to mistrust, isolation, fortification, violent conflict, instability, etc., which will end up in less good stuff being made overall, and in less chances of me getting what is made. Enlightened self-interest dictates that fair trade is the best option in the long run.