| Chapter 1: | A Global, Low-Cost Network Thrives |
“As a stubborn optimist/idealist, I hope this will be true. However, it will only occur to the extent that the power and greed of massive private-sector conglomerates can be held in check, and the desire of governments to censor and control content can be restrained. It will obviously vary wildly, between nations. Also, one advantage that poor nations have, is that they often have no established infrastructure that will be threatened.” —Jim Warren, founding editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal; technology policy advocate; futurist
“While we think of a portable radio with batteries as possibly the lowest cost medium, there are a lot of people who cannot afford this, or, as in Uganda, men take the batteries so their wives cannot use the radio (reflect-action.org is the source). I also worry about the problem of Net neutrality balkanizing the U.S. Internet, the walled gardens of the telco mobile services, and of course the Chinese setting up their own domains. However, in spite of these barriers, more people will be using the Internet on a global basis, but I can’t forecast the percentage.” —Steve Cisler, former senior library scientist for Apple; now working on public-access projects in Guatemala, Ecuador, and Uganda
“The network might not be perfect, but it will certainly be widespread. We already have a telephone network which reaches all over the world, and worldwide access to GPS. So it’s not too much of a stretch to extend this to wireless. Though there may be artificial barriers at the country level (e.g., China may not interoperate for political reasons, even if it could at a technical level).” —Seth Finkelstein, anticensorship activist and programmer; author of the Infothought blog; EFF Pioneer Award winner
“Worldwide interoperability and that wireless will likely be free, at least in some form, to everyone. I don’t understand what authentication and billing are doing in that sentence. I think it’s perfectly plausible that identifying people reliably is impossible, full stop. As to billing—what if it turns out that the marginal cost of information and knowledge goods is too cheap to meter? Do we need billing? Couldn’t we have blanket licenses, instead?” —Cory Doctorow, blogger and cofounder of Boing Boing; EFF Fellow
“This will be true for many people, but not for everyone.” —Esther Dyson, former chair of ICANN; now of CNET Networks