Internet Imaginings

Nowadays, an unconnected computer is, perhaps, as unproductive as a car without roads to drive on. The computer is the vehicle and the Internet, the thoroughfare by which our minds are enriched – traveling through patches of information, briefly pausing here and there, and then frolicking on to everywhere.

With the pervasive culture of sharing and free flow and exchange of information, cradled and nurtured by the Internet (captured as the promotional underpinnings of Limewire, Vuze, Beemp3.com, Wikipedia, Youtube, and so many others of the like), together with the irresistible dependence upon it for multi-faceted transactions, which nearly makes it a neoteric necessity (akin to mobile phones and its services), government-provided free Internet access for open public consumption should be considered.

Many substantial considerations aside – to put it simplistically – the potential of shaping Internet access into a public good and molding it into a demandable public right which makes it the duty of government to provide, anchored, perhaps, on a tweaked conception of the right to information and/or the right to education, while quite imaginative, seems as much alluring. To be sure, the exercise of rights are never really free, but at the very least, once free Internet access is treated as a right, government could be prodded to engage itself in an unprecedented program to make access costs to the Internet as close to zero as possible, perhaps by funding infrastructure for nationwide Internet connectivity, or simply by placing ceilings on private Internet service providers to put rates even below present competitive levels.

The perceived benefits that such a program could give birth to cannot justly be dismissed as unimportant. As an example, as already done by several agencies and local government units, government’s paper transaction costs can be lessened, by posting online all legal instruments that require publishing and/or posting (although the law on posting and publication would have to be amended accordingly for this purpose), and also other forms, which can be accomplished online or downloaded by persons availing government services. Also, educational materials, on a greater magnitude, can be broadcast over the Internet, a la Knowledge Channel, and be continuously available to students anytime they should please to access it, perhaps with an Internet-capable mobile phone (today, it would be shocking for a person not to have a mobile phone, regardless of one’s economic stature; perhaps, later, it could become shocking for a person not to have ready and free access to the Internet, ceteris paribus).

While such a program may, by itself, be insufficient to realize its many envisioned ultimate benefits, it would be, by itself, already a proactive nudge into the future of how individuals will transact business, learn, and indulge in leisure.

Then, we traveled only on foot; then on wheels; until there were wings. Government-provided free public access to the Internet will be the wings of learning, business, and leisure, flying us to high aims and distant reaches whichever remote locality in the country we may be.

Raul Grapilon

Blog Entry No. 3