If you're reading this you are part of an exclusive club. No I don't mean being a reader of this blog (which will hopefully become less exclusive as time goes on), I mean being on the internet. If you're on the internet you've likely got this preconception like I have that this interactive platform is arguably one of the greatest inventions of all mankind among the greats such as the wheel, electricity, the longer lasting light bulb and of course Led Zeppelin IV.
However it may be a bit of an eye opener to realise that less than 200,000,000 people have access to the internet. Now that's a lot of digits to work out so let me put it this way. That's less than 3% of the global population. It's incredibly slanted how distributed internet access is and it seems near criminal that this is the case.
The internet in my eyes is this glorious platform that should be benefited by all of mankind. When you have vast libraries of information free for everyone that can access it, I think that this is a shining beacon of the ingenuity of humanity. People sharing information, discoveries, opinions and art to the rest of civilization. However it appears that entire continents are left without illumination. Is this right? Should access to the internet be a human right?
In recent news, the principle of net neutrality has come under attack. Net neutrality is essentially the principle that the internet should be a free and open forum without restriction from internet service providers or governments. If two people subscribe for access to the internet then the two should be able to connect to each other at that level of access. ISPs are now considering introducing tiered access to create artificial scarcity. Those that can afford a premium level of service will be granted more bandwidth to provide and access content and only others on the same level of subscription will be able to access that content. So say Google subscribes to this philosophy, all of a sudden everyone has to pay more to have access to Google. If not then alternatives will have to be looked upon, alternatives which won't have the bandwidth to accomodate the large amounts of traffic that Google servers are capable of handling. Can you handle search engines which take 5+ seconds to search as opposed to the millisecond responses you get with Google?
Scary times are ahead indeed. But will ISPs be wrong in doing this? The internet is quite possibly the most socialist platform you could imagine. Stuff for free flying around everywhere and as soon as an advertisment pops up, immediate outrage from the community. Paying to use a service? What nonsense! But how else are companies meant to run their services without sponsorship? Having to sit through a 30 second ad on Spotify for free access to the entire Spotify library for free? Outrageous. That sponsor ad on your Facebook page making it look all cluttered? Unacceptable. An ISP charging for companies that hog up precious bandwidth? Insane?
Now I'm not saying that this money driven way of running a service is right, neither am I saying that companies should operate under the thumb of the masses and be taking in a minimum sustainable amount while all revenue is reinvested into making services free and faster. It really is the only way that the internet is going to be able to operate unless someone else can think of an alternative method.
If everything should be free for everyone, then should we not focus on getting that other 97% of the world access as opposed to keeping our fast streamlined service to ourselves? The internet as it is cannot handle the 3%/3% of the population operating at once, how will it handle the wider world?
So does the internet become an exclusive clube of the have versus the have nots? Will it become run into obsoletion because ISPs are unable to bring in money to grow infrastructure? Perhaps this internet is not as robust as we think?
However it may be a bit of an eye opener to realise that less than 200,000,000 people have access to the internet. Now that's a lot of digits to work out so let me put it this way. That's less than 3% of the global population. It's incredibly slanted how distributed internet access is and it seems near criminal that this is the case.
The internet in my eyes is this glorious platform that should be benefited by all of mankind. When you have vast libraries of information free for everyone that can access it, I think that this is a shining beacon of the ingenuity of humanity. People sharing information, discoveries, opinions and art to the rest of civilization. However it appears that entire continents are left without illumination. Is this right? Should access to the internet be a human right?
In recent news, the principle of net neutrality has come under attack. Net neutrality is essentially the principle that the internet should be a free and open forum without restriction from internet service providers or governments. If two people subscribe for access to the internet then the two should be able to connect to each other at that level of access. ISPs are now considering introducing tiered access to create artificial scarcity. Those that can afford a premium level of service will be granted more bandwidth to provide and access content and only others on the same level of subscription will be able to access that content. So say Google subscribes to this philosophy, all of a sudden everyone has to pay more to have access to Google. If not then alternatives will have to be looked upon, alternatives which won't have the bandwidth to accomodate the large amounts of traffic that Google servers are capable of handling. Can you handle search engines which take 5+ seconds to search as opposed to the millisecond responses you get with Google?
Scary times are ahead indeed. But will ISPs be wrong in doing this? The internet is quite possibly the most socialist platform you could imagine. Stuff for free flying around everywhere and as soon as an advertisment pops up, immediate outrage from the community. Paying to use a service? What nonsense! But how else are companies meant to run their services without sponsorship? Having to sit through a 30 second ad on Spotify for free access to the entire Spotify library for free? Outrageous. That sponsor ad on your Facebook page making it look all cluttered? Unacceptable. An ISP charging for companies that hog up precious bandwidth? Insane?
Now I'm not saying that this money driven way of running a service is right, neither am I saying that companies should operate under the thumb of the masses and be taking in a minimum sustainable amount while all revenue is reinvested into making services free and faster. It really is the only way that the internet is going to be able to operate unless someone else can think of an alternative method.
If everything should be free for everyone, then should we not focus on getting that other 97% of the world access as opposed to keeping our fast streamlined service to ourselves? The internet as it is cannot handle the 3%/3% of the population operating at once, how will it handle the wider world?
So does the internet become an exclusive clube of the have versus the have nots? Will it become run into obsoletion because ISPs are unable to bring in money to grow infrastructure? Perhaps this internet is not as robust as we think?
