With a touch over.$700 milion a year , if the fumd provided grants to micro isps of $500 per household, you could wire up 1.1 million families a year. With connections to schools, libraries, and granges you could probably directly touch 3 million.people.a.year.
With a rural population of 59 million, with say half already have access and ten million don’t want it, and a population growth rate of -0.6%, a two dollar a month tax would alleviate the biggest problems in three years and the vast majority in eight years.
Even with 10% graft, corruption, and overhead it only adds about a year to each. And at $35/month plus taxes (so really $40ish), and if the microisps had to be 501(3)c to qualify for grants, it would be self.sustaining.
Lastly, adding 1.1 million households would add $24 million annually, which means year two you add 1.4 million households and $36 million, and so forth. Then, when the subscriber revenue starts rolling it… It is a multi, multi billion dollar infrastructure project that just added, err, 45,000 middle class jobs.
Its clearly not a right on the level of clean water and food, but we have made a world where having access to food, clean water, housing and medical attention are subject to your participation in the economy, and we’ve made the internet part of the economy, Should you have a right to participate in the economy? Is that a basic human right?
Roads are not free, yet we don’t debate whether having access to roads is a human right. We recognize that the modern world requires them and we find a way to build them.
I seem to have difficulty shouting over the voices in some other peoples heads.
No, I am not taking or trying to take the internet away from anyone. On the contrary, I think that restricting human rights to freedom of speech and ‘the internet’ but excluding all other forms of communication allows all sorts of wriggle room for dodgy practices. What is ‘access to the internet’? You have the right to submit packets, or the right to subscribe to a service, or the right to join a particular forum? Individual forums or services currently reserve the right to ban particular nuisance members, and this keeps some sort of check on the trolls. But if all the service providers shared their records, and an incorrect political opinion got you and your family banned from all of them forever, then that would clearly be an issue, and I would argue it would be a human rights issue. But we know this without having a precise definition of ‘access to the internet’.
At this point, another set of voices starts yelling ‘you mean I have to buy a computer and pay for the internet connections for everyone who hasn’t got them because it is their right to troll me?’. No, again. No-one should open your post and censor your letters, but I don’t have to lend you a stamp. We should have freedom of speech, but we do not have to give the Wesbro Parish Church the address of the local gays. And so on. Again, all without having a precise definition of ‘access to the internet’.
No, I don’t have a Magic Box ™ that tells me what is right and wrong. I suspect you don’t have one ether. Most of the cases are pretty obvious, and the rest of the time we wing it. Humans do that, and its okay. Adding a $1000/hour lawyer does not always make things better.
Nobody is asking you to lend me a stamp. You’re taking a social contract one that we both have with an otherwise neutral third party and making it one between you and I suddenly. It isn’t. Millions and millions of people comprise the postal system. An example where you personally buy someone else some stamps… well heck, (and allow me for the sake of rhetoric only make an equally absurd counter argument: why not just ask why you have to buy poor kids free school lunch when you don’t even have kids?)
The post. Education, Highways. Broadcast airwaves.
These are things supported by, regulated by, and in some part paid for by us all collectively. We do not get more access to because we pay more in taxes, in America. (and where we do, look at who defends that). We’re not (supposed to be) that selfish, we agreed to promote the common welfare and lower barriers to access.
The internet is, arguably, as useful a technology as the invention of the road. You don’t have to get anyone a ferrari, but yeah, a fleet of Tata’s isn’t actually going to cost us all that much. Consider it.
Faaantastic. I am now trying to take school meals away from poor children: I am sooo evil, aren’t I? It just gets better and better. Actually, no, I live in the UK with its’ National Health service, and state education, and I like it like that. I wouldn’t trade it for any amount of freedom and guns.
Human rights is something that humans have just because they are humans. In practice, it is a really basic, rock-bottom level that all decent people ought to subscribe to. Some don’t, but perhaps with enough international pressure, we can pressure some of the others to go along. However, if people are going to conflate human rights with having broadband, and other first world problems (I am reminded of the magazine headline “Inside: A family’s desperate search for a second pony”) then we risk losing the whole argument.
