Access & Digital Divide

ACCESS AND DIGITAL
DIVIDE
COM 597
Kathy E. Gill
22 November 2010

AREAS OF DISCUSSION
 Digital Divide
 Access and Accessibility
 Public Space

DIGITAL DIVIDE: NOT JUST 3RD WORLD
 Definition: The gap between those who have
access to or who can benefit from technology
and those who cannot
 Examples:
 US: Rural/Urban broadband access
 US: “poor” / “rich” (access)
 English v “everything else”
 Half of the world’s population has never made a
telephone call (ITU)
 Internet indicators by country (pdf)

INTERNET ACCESS PER 100
INHABITANTS, UN DATA

1 IN 5 HOUSEHOLDS WORLDWIDE
HAVE BROADBAND INTERNET
ACCESS, GARTNER
 2008 – 382 million households

ACCESS AND ACCESSIBILITY (1/2)
 There’s “access” and then there’s
“accessibility”
 Do we have access to a technology?
 Does the technology allow everyone access
(accessibility)?
 Whose responsibility is it to help make the
internet more accessible to all?
Government, Industry, us?

ACCESS AND ACCESSIBILITY (2/2)
 Network neutrality is hot “access” topic
 Feb 2006: AOL and Yahoo proposed fee to ensure
e-mail delivery (IHT, 6 Feb 2006)
 $0.025 to $0.01 per e-mail
 Would not be subject to existing user spam filters
 A benefit for businesses (Ascribe, 2 Feb 2006)
 AT&T and others proposed “access-tiering” (two-
tier Internet) (Red Herring, 31 Jan 2006)
 Prioritize packets? Streaming video is the rationale

NET NEUTRALITY
 There is something wrong with network owners saying
“we’ll guarantee fast video service from NBC on your
broadband account.” And there is something especially
wrong with network owners telling content or service
providers that they can’t access a meaningful
broadband network unless they pay an access tax.
 I don’t mean “wrong” in the sense of immoral, or even
unfair. My argument is not about the social justice of
Internet access. I mean “wrong” in the sense that such a
policy will inevitably weaken application competition on
the Internet, and that in turn will weaken Internet
growth.
 Testimony, Lawrence Lessig, Stanford, Senate Commerce, Science and
Transportation Committee, 7 February 2006

CONNECTIVITY
 Statistics are, to put it mildly, squishy
 2006: Canada led the G7 group of
industrialized countries in broadband
penetration (OECD); US was 16th (ITU)
 2008: US ranked 19th
in speed (OECD)
 See
http://wiredpen.com/2010/02/23/fcc-issues-new-broa

US IS NOT WORLD TECH LEADER
 New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman,
Aug 2005: (tongue-in-check) considering a run for
President, promised that after four years, our cell
phone service would be at least as good as
Ghana's, and if elected for a second term, as good
as Japan’s.

WHAT SPEEDS MEAN
 Cable
 Basic: 4 Mbps to 6 Mbps
 High End: 12 Mbps to 16 Mbps and faster
 DSL
 Basic: 768 Kbps to 1.5 Mbps
 High End: 3 Mbps to 7 Mbps
 Fiber Optic Cable: 15Mbps – 25 Mbps
 Mobile
 EDGE Up to 58Kbps, average 22Kbps
 Mobile – 3G AT&T: Download, 700-1.7 Mbps; Upload, 500 Kbps – 1.2
MbpSprint: Download, 600Kbps – 1.4 MbpsVerizon: 600 Kbps to
1.4Mbps
 Mobile – 4G Download: 3-6 Mbps
 Satellite: 10 – 20kbps
 WiMax (like Clear): Download: 3-6 Mbps
 South Korea 1 Gbps (2012)
 Japan Average advertised: 93.6 Mbps (2007)
 France Average advertised: 44.1 Mbps (2007)

AVERAGE ADVERTISED
BROADBAND SPEED SEPT 2008,
OECD

FCC GOAL (MARCH 2010)
 By 2020, to connect 100 million U.S. households
(~85 percent) to 100 Mbps high speed broadband
 Compare:
 Australia: 100 Mpbs to 90 percent households by
2018 (two years and ~5 percent ahead of U.S. plan)
 Finland: 100 Mbps in every household by 2016 (four
years and ~15 percent ahead of the U.S. plan
 Singapore: next generation Internet to all households
by 2013 (seven years and ~15 percent ahead of U.S.
plan
 South Korea: 1 Gbps by 2014 (six years and an order
of magnitude ahead of U.S. plan)

PUBLIC SPACE: FORM OF ACCESS
 “From the time that humans first defined
private spaces, public spaces have served as
places where people have come together to
exchange ideas. From the ancient Greek's
Agora to the Middle Ages' Commons to early
20th century American urban streets and
parks, public spaces have been centers for
free speech and public discourse.”
 Howard Besser, UCLA, 2001

PUBLIC SPACE AND FREE SPEECH
 “[T]he First Amendment affords the public
access to discussion, debate, and the
dissemination of information and ideas... the
right to receive information is an inherent
corollary of the rights of free speech and
press that are explicitly guaranteed by the
Constitution... the right to receive ideas is a
necessary predicate to the recipient's
meaningful exercise of his own rights of
speech, press, and political freedom."
 Supreme Court, 1978, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti

PUBLIC SPACE IS IMPORTANT
 Public space provides the potential for the
gathering of people who might not otherwise
come in contact with one another in their daily
lives. In this way public space is crucial to the
public sphere (Jacobs, 1999)
 In public space, action gains publicity because
it is visible to the public (Mattson, 1999;
Putnam, 2000)
 Cyberspace has been called a surrogate public
space (Gumpert & Drucker, 1992, 1998) or the
"electronic agora" (Rheingold 1993, 14).

PUBLIC SPACE NURTURES
DIVERSITY
 Open to everyone
 No monetary barrier, no physical barrier (ADA), no
“color” barrier (desegregation)
 Examples: city streets, parks, public
transportation, public buildings
 Others?

PSEUDO PUBLIC SPACE
 Shopping malls, sports stadiums
 Private spaces
 Can control speech
 Can control access
 Facebook? Twitter? MySpace?

AIRWAVES AS PUBLIC SPACE
 Radio and TV licenses predicated on broadcasting that
serves the “public interest”
 Public Radio and TV (PBS)
 What happens if “everyone” watches “cableTV,” a
private space?
 How might “internet TV” provide another pseudo
commons?

“PUBLIC SPACE” IN CYBERSPACE
 Public (free) WiFi in the US
 Spokane
 New York Parks, Google in NY/SF
 Coffee shops in Seattle
 Free WiFi Directory
 By providing free WiFi, do you think that we are
intensifying a constant need for news, info and
entertainment? Why or why not? When you use
wireless networks, do you feel safe or do you have
reservations about security?

THE NEW DIGITAL DIVIDE :
LITERACY

SUMMARY
 Access is only part of the DD story
 Although most of the DD story is outside our
borders, it’s not just outside our border
 Access also means public space
 Public space is important, changing
 Network TV -> Cable TV -> ipTV
 Rise of pseudo public space
 Efforts to foster public space in cyberspace
include community networks and publicly
accessible WiFi

CREDITS
 Kathy E Gill, @kegill or kegill@uw.edu
 Creative Commons License: attribution, non-
commercial, share-and-share-alike

Access & Digital Divide

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