[Chapter-delegates] [Internet Policy] Worth Note!

[Marcin Cieslak]

On Thu, 7 May 2015, John Laprise wrote:

> In part. Another (bigger) advantage has to do with US
> telecommunication law and policy and in particular the 1996
> Telecommunication act which inadvertently (and to the consternation of
> established telecommunications companies) made local interconnection
> highly lucrative. The explosive growth of the ISP market during that
> period has a lot to do with TA96.

That reminds me on my first trip to the U.S when I converted my hotel landline
into a permanent fixed Internet connection which lasted for 5 days straight
thanks to Earthlink's 5 day trial period :) That was awesome.

But that is also a reason why the AOL analogy is incomplete - in most
countries outside of the world you have to pay (hefty) data or
connection time fees. I know that AOL wasn't free and not even cheap,
but you could dial another local, free number and get your
IP address from somebody else at competitive conditions.

US/AOL way doesn't have to be the only way to ramp up
the mass market.

In April 1996 Polish Telecom (the incumbent)
launched a no-signup, no-Internet-access fee landline
country-wide Internet access number. So you had to
pay only a local connection fee (and there was also
an advantage of 7% VAT on top of that instead of
the usual 22% for Internet access) and you got your
unlimited IPv4 address. The cost was around $3 USD
per hour (quite a lot at this time given typical
purchasing power in the country at the time).

This move, as much as it pretty much killed (a not very
developed by then) dial-up ISP competition, but it teleported
a whole country into the XXI century almost immediately.

No walled garden. Nothing. You weren't even redirected
to some stupid mandatory webpage or something - just
straight, clean, pure Internet. The username
and password are "ppp". (It works fine even today).

As a result, the country had outstanding Internet penetration
as compared to less lucky neighbors, various e-services
developed much earlier and to a wider scale as compared
to many countries in Europe.

Internet.org offering seems to combine the worst of the
two worlds in one package - offering AOL-style walled
garden in a heavily regulated, non-competitive
prohibitive telecommunication environment.

At best, it may end up like the French Minitel story
(I am simplifying here) - the French lagged behind
with adoption of the Internet services since they have
had a set-top-box information terminals at home for
years already.

I attended France Telecom's presentation in Warsaw
in the early 1990s, suggesting they were testing the
possibility to offer Minitel in Poland at the time.

We were so lucky that the (although anti-competitive)
but content-neutral IP-based alternative has been
implemented instead.

~Marcin