“A political decision needs to be taken to bridge the gap in accessing the internet”
Op-ed by Simona Levi, Director of Postgraduate Studies at the University of Barcelona and Founder of Xnet
Simona Levi, Director of Postgraduate Studies at the University of Barcelona and Founder of Xnet, was the first expert we invited for our online Conversations on Digital Rights.
The internet is a fundamental tool, yet Europeans continue to experience challenges in accessing it. The core reason is economic: internet access is still not affordable enough for many families. During the Covid-19 pandemic, especially, we have seen how big of a problem it is for families who, for instance, have a single computer to share for home-schooling, teleworking and other daily tasks.
Europe is currently making a big effort on a geographical front, to improve access to the internet for all, across the continent. But in countries like Spain, internet facilities are not among local administrations’ priorities, despite the demand coming from the population. Beyond this, access to the internet is controlled by a handful of companies, leading to high prices for the public.
It is a responsibility from national governments to carry out negotiations with internet providers, to satisfy the needs of the population to have access to this public service at a decent price. This problem, in the end, is very political: a political decision needs to be taken to bridge the gap in accessing the internet.
There is an important discussion going on at the European Parliament, with the support of the European Parliament’s president, on the question of internet access as a human right. Europe has become a core place in which to defend an internet with no discrimination: what we call net neutrality. Internet must today be considered the same way housing or food are, or at least like electricity: a basic public service, to which all should have access.
“What we look at when working on democratic digitalization is the internet like a new structure for governance, one that provides a very healthy way to distribute leadership”
With Xnet, we are currently carrying out a project focusing on the democratic digitalization of education, and one of the difficulties remains the cost of a reliable internet access for schools: this remains unaffordable for many of them. Despite education having to be made through the internet during the pandemic, the connection remains weak for many schools and families, therefore part of the students has had a very difficult access to education during that time. This needs to be addressed.
And beyond the question of access to the internet, what we look at when working on democratic digitalization is the internet like a new structure for governance, one that provides a very healthy way to distribute leadership, with different nodes that combine to form a network.
While our societies are always trying to find solutions for good governance, the internet provides us with a structure to transform the way we govern our societies, a way in which all of our abilities could be put to use for the common good. In that sense, democratic digitalization is about democracy in accessing the tools but also transforming our societies to make them more transparent, open, and a place in which all can deploy their abilities and live happily.
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Photo by Lars Kienle on Unsplash
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