| Pierre on the Electronic Frontier |
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| Written by Pierre Maré | ||||
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How much Internet is right? What Internet is acceptable? Who pays for it? These are the questions at the heart of the net neutrality question. These are also questions that must be asked by those who are concerned with the developmental impact of the Internet on Namibia.
At the outset, it must be recognised that the Internet is not as
homogeneous as it used to be when it was first devised. The early
Internet was dominated by text. Pictures were slow and unwieldy. Chat
consisted of basic IRC protocols. Files were transferred by disc. The
vast amount of spam, which clogs up bandwidth, did not exist. At the time, the Internet was quite similar to what it was intended to be: a fairly dry and academic place that existed for the exchange of information. All that was to change. The strange spur to development in the early phase of the Internet was pornography. In 1995, a survey estimated that 83,5 percent of the content of the Usenet consisted of porn. This generated a huge controversy and, though unconfirmed, a huge number of sign-ups. Although there may not be a causal link, movie and sound soon followed. Your guess is as good as mine. Today the Internet is a very busy place: movies and programme files travel along the bandwidth. So do games. The Internet is heavily dominated by visual material of all sorts. All of this takes large amounts of bandwidth. The net was not originally envisaged as a highly graphic environment. It was supposed to be an egalitarian, academic environment. Yet the amount of bandwidth is placing continuous strain on resources, and the cost of addressing that strain is growing. Bandwidth costs money to put in place and maintain. Business came up with what seemed a logical answer: Lock consumption down with proprietary software and charges according to use. Although charge according to use is fairly commonplace here, it is not so common elsewhere, where the extremely expensive infrastructure has been taken as a given. Nor did this idea sit well with its egalitarian founders. |
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