Internet Access Shouldn't be a Right

For some time now, the EU has been calling for Internet access to be made a universal right for all mankind. Anyone who opposes making it a right gets tarred with the brush of supporting government censorship by withholding Internet access: think China in Xinjiang, Iran when protests break out, or India abrogating Article 370.

Proponents of the idea, however, are mixing up two different issues: (1) That everyone needs Internet access today is obvious. (2) But that doesn’t mean it should be a right.

Why not? What’s the problem here? Look no further than Alex Tabarrok’s piece on what happens when people treat electricity a right… in India. He quotes this study to explain what happens gradually:
“Because electricity is seen as a right, subsidies, theft, and nonpayment are widely tolerated.”
Inevitably then, the electricity companies bleed money. If selling/ transmitting more units of power means greater losses, it is but rational that:
“Distribution companies try to sell less of their product.”
Thus, electricity begins to fall outside the market forces of demand and supply:
“(The mindset that) electricity is a right (leads to) a low-quality, low-payment equilibrium.”
Ironically then, everyone suffers, rich and poor, bill payer and non-bill payer. The equilibrium is further strengthened by the benefits of bribing officials rather than paying the bill. “Corruption with theft” ensures the equilibrium never changes.

The study then goes a step further and looks at the role of poverty in all this. And they found poverty isn’t the main reason for this situation!
“The vast majority of customers in Bihar expect no penalty from paying a bill late, illegally hooking into the grid, wiring around a meter, or even bribing electricity officials to avoid payment. These attitudes are in stark contrast to how the same consumers view payment for private goods like cellphones. It is debatable whether cellphones are more important than electricity, but in Bihar we find that the poor spend three times more on cellphones than they do on electricity.”

All of which is why Tabarrok comes to this conclusion:
“To ensure that everyone has access to high quality electricity the government must credibly commit that electricity is not a right.”
The same argument applies for Internet access. And the argument applies across (poorer) countries, and so the EU idea of making Internet access a right, while well intentioned, will turn out to be detrimental to poorer countries. Thank God the idea hasn’t got passed at the UN.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more