[governance] FW: [1st-mile-nm] FCC Lifeline Program

[Michael Gurstein]

I'm most certainly not against subsidies, the question is how they are
structured and to whom they flow (and you have misread my note re: the
Lifeline Program which overall I think is a useful one in the US context). 

If I had my druthers the provision of Internet access to the marginalized
and those in rural areas would be a "pull" rather than a "push" although
some degree of both is required.  A good example to me is the program near
Mysore in India which Parminder's colleague Anita Gurumurthy has been
conducting with rural Dalit women, organizing them to demand and receive
Internet service through their local Panchyat and training/using local
support workers while ensuring a degree of content of interest in local
languages.  Similar community informatics programs have been very successful
with native Canadian First Nations in northwestern Ontario and with tribal
people in remote rural Borneo. 

In India I've never understood why the Panchyats overall have not been used
to develop local infrastructure, demand and capacity for Internet use
(although I belief there are some recent developments in that direction
coming from various states).  I know there are problems with corruption but
that is a more general problem and there are again local means to control
corruption if resources are available to support this (including not
surprisingly programs for training women as grass roots auditors as has been
reasonably successful locally for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural
Employment Guarantee Program, I believe.

In sub-Saharan Africa that type of generalized social/organizational
infrastructure is often not available at the grassroots level so it is more
complicated and particularly to get scale but working through local
churches, schools and medical facilities can often and usefully provide the
local organization and capacity for facilitating effective Internet "pull".

One significant advantage of developing a demand before ensuring a supply is
that the availability of service is very much more likely to be sustained
and sustainable because of the social infrastructure which has been put in
place. This infrastructure can go a long way at the community level to
ensure that the cost of the service may be supportable in the longer term
since it is providing a service which is recognizably of local value.

One significant problem in many countries in SSA is that as a consequence of
the truly deplorable market fundamentalist IMF/World Bank Structural
Adjustment Programs (SAPs) (a parallel to which the A4AI is so
enthusiastically promoting for Internet service through its fallacious "Best
Practices"), the pre-existing networks of local schools and medical programs
have been decimated in the service of more centralized fee paying services
with little local connection or responsibility at the grassroots and thus a
supporting infrastructure (that allows for sustainability) needs to be built
or rebuilt with many fewer local resources to successfully undertake the
task.

I could go on, but you get the flavour.

M
-----Original Message-----
From: Suresh Ramasubramanian [mailto:suresh at hserus.net] 
Sent: April 1, 2016 6:31 PM
To: governance at lists.igcaucus.org; Michael Gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [governance] FW: [1st-mile-nm] FCC Lifeline Program

Right - so you're against subsidies

And zero rating is a non starter too

Exactly how do you propose that the poor get internet access?

--srs

> On 02-Apr-2016, at 1:23 AM, Michael Gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hmmm, it seems that the fountainhead for untrammeled competition in the
Internet/Broadband, the USA, is implementing a program through government
regulation to enable those with low incomes to access broadband/the
Internet. 



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