Free Tops Out: What to Do?

Just in time for my thoughts on tech-inspired organizational prinicpals that don’t pan out, which included a criticism of the idea that blogging is somehow publishing for the prolitariat, came this from Ben Hammersley’s blog. It seems Baghdad blogger Salam Pax’s blog is so popular that it’s sucking bandwidth not just from its host, Blogspot (owned by Blogger owned by Google), but from the other web services Salam’s site uses. It seems to be a popular conception that bandwidth is free; I was sorry to hear the often uber-bright Cory Doctorow espouse this misconception on TechTV a few weeks back.

But think about it: moving packets around means electricity, telecom infrastructure (wires, cable, satellites, etc.), hardware (routers), and personell to run and maintain all this. None of that is free, and while the prices charged for bandwidth are well above maintainance costs, well, welcome to capitalism. Similarly, services like Blogspot that run on bandwidth and human maintainance can only be free while the sites they host don’t require any major allocation of either of those costly resources.

There’s no need to write another diatribe about how the dotcom-era free services met their fate. But it would be nice if people realized that there’s not really a technical solution to the bandwidth problem; distribute the cost as much as you like via (awkward) peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent, but ultimately the bandwidth, with all its associated costs, has to be paid for, and new infrastructure invested in. But damnit, I’m still utopian about the empowering nature of access to information and computing resources, particularly for people who otherwise wouldn’t have them. It’s quite a bind, and I hate to bring up problems and not suggest solutions, but this is a tough one. In the late ‘90s it looked like the potential of online commerce was enough incentive for the telecom industry to wire all the world, but then people remembed how economics actually work. As aforementioned, the technical solutions to route around the costs only sort of work, and can’t work where there’s no connectivity.

So how do we get the next Salam Pax from some even more remote and desperate part of the world online and enabled? Think hard, because we need her. Freedom, in a sense greater than that in which the US employs the term, needs her.