|
|
|
Broadband should be a human right |
|
|
|
Tuesday, 15 August 2006 |
|
The European Union is deliberating whether access to a landline telephone should be a human right.
Perhaps mad but as usual it does not go far enough. Politicians are in
the main, woefully behind the cutting edge of technology so any
pronouncements they make will only serve to hinder its development....
A far more sensible decision by the law-makers in Brussels would be that broadband access is a human right.
A suggestion I am sure that will be greeted by shouts of outrage as every rational person instantly cries out who pays?
Very reasonable. With rights go responsibilities.
If you have a right to global communication then don't you also have an obligation to pay for the means to do it?
A question now cutting at the heart of the communication industry.
New internet telephony systems such as Skype and sip-based Voip phones
are now threatening the demise of the old telecommunication companies.
To be fair they have made a killing from the consumer for a long time, but they did provide the network.
AT&T has now gone from being one of the world's largest companies
to one that was recently swallowed by SBC, one of its spin-offs.
The parent has been eaten by its child.
BT, the company whose 90s slogan was ‘its good to talk’ has admitted that it now sees landlines as only a part of a package.
WiFi networks could threaten mobile phone companies, and there are
already rumours that broadband connections will soon be given away
free.
Wonderful – it’s Christmas, but who pays for the network?
Television we are told will be the cure for the industry, television
via mobile, PC and PDA will generate the revenues for an industry that
was once worth $3 trillion worldwide.
Only it won't, because the companies that are now undercutting the
telecommunications industry and forcing it to its knees, will soon find
ways to re-route TV from our own computers to our own phones and PDAs
via our own high-speed broadband connections.
Take heed Vodafone and look at www.orb.com. Mr Murdoch, Sky may be falling in.
At Von Europe, the internet telephony companies Old World knees-up, all
of the talk was about IPTV, apparently it is the next coming thing.
Prompting the thought what could Niklas Zennstom, Skype’s founder, be thinking of next?
So TV might not be the answer. It seems that in the democratic new
world of the web it’s just getting more difficult for big companies to
rip us off in quite the way they did before. Technology is empowering
the consumer.
So give everyone broadband, let the new market make an economy out of it, but it won’t be free.
If broadband is human right then it may cost you some birth-rights.
Be ready for a world where in return for a phone you will give away
your privacy, sign away to a company the right to monitor your
behaviour and agree to be bombarded with endless advertising.
We pay taxes for clean high streets, the same will be true for the cyber street
|
|
|
|
|