Should the Internet be Free?

In 1993 Tim Berners-Lee convinced Cern managers to donate the Intelectual Property of the World Wide Web to the public domain. He wasn’t after money, he wanted it to further our collective knowledge as a species and a society.

There are projects that live on the Internet that remain free to the public, like Linux, Gimp, and Git that are so useful that they have turned many capitalist ideals on their heads. Open Source was called a cancer and dangerous to capitalism, and yet here Amazon is funding it because it keeps their business alive.

But these projects are all Intellectual Property and so of course we couldn’t possibly make that free. We pay taxes so that we can have roads because without roads we wouldn’t need cars. If our taxes went towards trains or other public transportation the industry might fail, and we can’t have that.

What would a world look like where the internet was free? The physical infrastructure of the network was built by Bell Telephone Company, and in many cases it continues to be maintained by AT&T which acquired Bell in 1899. Fiber optic lines are stretched across the oceans every year. Lines go to Wire and Switching centers where they are then fanned out to metropolitan areas and eventually individual houses that pay a monthly fee to use the network.

Those fees ultimately support that infrastructure and often come with key features like Customer Premise Equipment (the router or “WiFi” that you probably have at home right now). You could instead be expected to provide your own equipment to interface with the network, but convenience is far more profitable.

The system as it stands is a very stable house of cards. The companies rely on cheap labor to sell and maintain these systems and simultaneously on your ever rising fees. These companies also do not favor spreading into non metropolitan areas, which causes hikes in prices for folks living farther away from any large Switching Center.

Really quick; packets are small pieces of data, that’s how data is moved across the network

But have you ever noticed that Netflix seems to just work better than other streaming services? That isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t even because their app is particularly better than any other streaming app. That is because Netflix pays for a monopoly on network traffic, so that if it is a race between an HBO packet and a Netflix packet the Netflix packet is prioritized and wins by default.

These are the types of things that happen in a capitalistic internet. The best do not win. The competition is not creating a better product, the competition is creating a pissing contest of who has the most money that they can use to keep getting the most money.

So what if the internet was free? Companies could still pay to build infrastructure, and heck that infrastructure could absolutely unfairly benefit them… until it reaches public domain. Public lines should be treated equally, it should not take any longer for my packet to reach you than any large company. And those lines should be free to use once they are installed.

The cost of the internet once it is running is power. After power it is new infrastructure. But if each piece of infrastructure was treated as an individual project then the cost of power is all that current users should be paying.
For example; if I pay to have a line run from the pole to my house, and I pay for the modem or other devices I need to interface with the network, that should be the end of the line. The cost to maintain or repair the main lines (or the Trunk) should fall to tax dollars, not to the private sector.

The Internet and otherwise computing in general is one of, if not the, greatest advancement in technology humans have ever achieved. It could be used for worldwide votes. The only reason it’s being used for social media is because it keeps you from wanting to do anything more.