Information, infrastructure and content.

Access to information should be considered a human right across the whole world by now. There is no point denying that one of the main sources of information is the internet, and in order to access it it is compulsory to have the necessary infrastructure to make it work. This is why, I think, it is so important to develop fast and reliable broadband to everyone without exceptions. After having the infrastructure, we come across with the issue of what it is going to be offered to the public through it.

‘Free Basics’ imposes itself as a service that is meant to provide information in a free manner but just like Shiva (2015) questions in his article: is it really free? She doesn’t see it that way and neither do I. From a broad perspective it certainly might look like a very humanitarian idea and that’s probably why many people blindly agree with it but the point lays in the fact that the service provides only a prearranged portion of information chosen in the end by companies with interests of their own. Lafrance (2016) gets a good point in pointing out that the ‘Free Basics’ services were adopted by people who already had access to the internet and who were interested because of it being a free service, instead of being adopted by those who had never been in the online spectrum. This shows that the issue needs to be dug deeper into. It is not only about the service and it comes back to what I pointed earlier on this paper, infrastructure and how information is accessed.

Projects like the NBN (National Broadband Network) play a huge role in the way people get information. Just like Westbury (2013) exposes on his blog, the advantages of it can shape not only ourselves as individuals but also people living in remote areas if their infrastructure were good enough, which at this state is not the case. It is just like he says, It’s not a matter of high speed but network quality and this is something that the government and all the other actors need to focus on.