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1Mb Broadband Access Becomes Legal Right In Finland
An anonymous reader writes "Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection, according to the Ministry of Transport and Communications. Finland is the world's first country to create laws guaranteeing broadband access. The Finnish people are also legally guaranteed a 100Mb broadband connection by the end of 2015."
... but seriously, how is access to a broadband Internet connection a legal right? Somebody please explain this to me, because the article doesn't give any supporting logic.
I need air to breathe, food to eat, clothes to wear, and a place to sleep at night. As much as I enjoy working in I.T. for a living, I do not need Internet access to survive.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
A right is something that cannot be taken from you, not an obligation on someone else to provide something to you.
If your rights are an imposition on someone else you're doing it wrong.
Politicians with too much time and not enough to do.
They do if enough people get together and agree that they do. Such is called government.
Lets hope you stay living in the US of A then.
Second that. People who come from disadvantaged families who want post-highschool education should have the opportunity to get it and not just be told "no, you've got to take and bare some responsibility on your own life".
If you're going to go back to fundamental existeance-based rights, the "freedom of speech" is also an artificial construct, which denies my basic human "right" to bash over the head anyone whom I don't like. In truth, all "rights" are a social agreement by which we can try and live in peace. Others in these comments talk about "right to shelter", whereas such a concept doesn't exist in primal society. You can construct your own shelter, and try and use it, as long as you're able fend off anyone else who'll come and try to take it.
As societal values shift, so does the implication of these socially-given "rights", which is why "Freedom of Speech", originally intended and implemented in social contract as a means of allowing people to express their own values and beliefs without fear of lethal repercussion, is now considered by most to mean "Freedom to invasively force my opinion on other people who don't care to hear it."
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
I can understand basic inalienable rights like food, shelter, clothing, and adequate healthcare. But a right to have internet access?
The way I see it is that if you take your list of inalienable rights and classify them as "human rights", you can classify health care, internet access, etc. as "societal rights" (those rights granted by the state for their citizens).
internet access being a right is an example of liberalism gone horribly wrong
Do you mean liberalism as defined by the various political parties and interest groups in the US, or Liberalism, generally? Either way, I don't think that term is useful or productive, especially when the context here is Finland.
In the US, the crowds shout "We insist on being free so don't dare try and give us any stuff", while in Europe, it's "Keep giving us free stuff or we'll bring you down!" Left-wing? Perhaps. But I suspect one side is getting a good deal, while the other ... well, what's the state of broadband in the US? ;-)
Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I want to be
Pony trekking or camping
Or just watching TV
Finland, Finland, Finland
It's the country for me
You're so near to Russia
So far from Japan
Quite a long way from Cairo
Lots of miles from Vietnam
Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I want to be
Eating breakfast or dinner
Or snack lunch in the hall
Finland, Finland, Finland
Finland has it all
You're so sadly neglected
And often ignored
A poor second to Belgium
When going abroad
Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I quite want to be
Your mountains so lofty
Your treetops so tall
Finland, Finland, Finland
Finland has it all
Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I quite want to be
Your mountains so lofty
Your treetops so tall
Finland, Finland, Finland
Finland has it all
Finland has it all
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Of course. But neither one of them are free.
Uh, you are aware that the US government has regulations requiring telephone access to everyone, right? This seems similar.
They do if enough people get together and agree that they do. Such is called government.
What happens if enough people get together and agree that certain people don't have rights? Such is called the tyranny of the majority.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Yes, the population in America is generally pretty dense, so we tend to lag behind the rest of the world.
Satellite is a high-latency service up to 500 to 900ms one way.
The result is that it's slow/unusable for many types of applications, which can't handle a 1 second round-trip delay.
In other words, it's not "broadband".
You won't be comfortable trying to use VoIP over satellite, and streaming media won't work at all without a stout amount of pre-buffering.
Non-ASCII characters do not belong in an URL.
Circumcision is child abuse.
It's called student loans, scholarships and jobs. I know people who have managed to pay for there entire college education with nothing but scholarships and one job while going to college full time. Nowhere was any government paying for them to go to school.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
How about IDN URLs? Example: http://anmälan.museum/
If I paste this into Firefox address bar, it works, but clicking the Slashfungarbulated link from this post's preview doesn't.
Conclusion: Slashcode barfs on IDN. Bad Slashcode.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
640Kb Blah bla blah...
Way to change the subject there.
// This is not a sig.
You must not travel much in America. In the very rural parts of Appalachia it is common, if not typical, for people to have extremely limited access to telephones or electricity. It's not a matter of choice, unless you believe being dirt poor and too poor to move away to be a choice.
It's not even "Keep giving us free stuff", because this is just about guaranteed availability of access, not free access. It's not even "free stuff" when it comes to healthcare and the like, considering that the citizens have to pay taxes.
What they're really saying is "Protect and manage our basic necessities, or we'll vote you out of office."
As an American living in one of the oft talked about rural areas of America with access to only dial up (which gives me a whopping 28.8k connection due to signal quality), or over priced satellite, I am more than ready for something along this line to be adopted here. At a time when more and more information and services are being distributed over the Internet, it gives us rural people a big disadvantage. For example, I work rotating shifts in a factory and would like to go to college to get a degree eventually. Due to my shift work, a physical classroom is out of the question, admissions would laugh me right out if the campus, but an online program through a local and respected school could help me to get to that goal. An online college course is not an option when it takes >30 minutes to load a 10 second video or when you have to split a 50 mb download over 5 nights to get the data. I promise, if the shoe were on the other foot you'd understand where I'm coming from.
Right, just like that self-employed guy who can't afford $2200 a month for $5000 deductible health insurance for his family and his wife gets cancer and loses his home. He's not stuck. He could always rob a liquor store or sell one of his kids.
But he does have options ("sniff").
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's been pretty amazing over the last few months watching Americans demand that the government NOT guarantee them affordable health care.
I really don't see why anyone would have assumed it was about free broadband for everyone.
It's the Libertardians who believe that anything a European has that they don't have must be provided by the evil, socialist government at gunpoint.
On another note, does anyone read this as a giant "Haista vittu and the m00se you rode in on!" to the **AA and their attempts to push the "three strikes" laws?
If something is a legal right, I imagine it would take (at the very least) conviction criminal court before it could be denied to you.
It happens right here in the USA.
We call them "gays".
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's one example. Although I personally think we should get the Government out of the "marriage" business altogether and have civil unions for all couples (hetro and homo). Let the priests dither over what "marriage" is and minimize the governmental involvement in a process which is basically nothing more than an agreement between two consenting adults.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You can spin things any way you want, to make whoever you want look bad. The people who demand that the government not guarantee affordable health care understand that someone is going to have to pay for it, and would rather negotiate those payments on their own terms rather than trust the government to do it for them.
Then there are people like me, who believe that healthcare should be made available to people who are poor or have pre-existing conditions, but believe that the current plans will make things worse rather than better. I'm even willing to pay higher taxes to help cover these people, but the current plan doesn't explain how it will be paid for, among other problems.
Qxe4
Don't they always chant population density as to reason why many people are stuck with dial-up?
Its weird that Australia, with 10% the population density as the USA has similar problems. Judging from the complaints from USA people on /. the situation in .au might actually be slightly better.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Not sure why you'd think I was trolling, I genuinely believe what I said.
The reasons for such service obligations are that it's becoming increasingly difficult to take part in normal life and society without that service, perhaps because so many important services and information sources are online. If entire areas are unable to access these, it will have a negative effect on the viability of that segment of society.
However, all of these that can be done with 1Mbps, except for the telecommuting that jhol13 mentions below, which I hadn't thought of.
If you want to get technical, broadband/baseband/passband/whatever have nothing to do with speed. And even the common-usage definition says nothing about latency.
They've already given telco companies billions... when they pass a bill with this right you can be sure it will include an additional tax on that will wind up costing you about 10x more than the service is worth.
That said, the US is much more regionally diverse (read 'f'ing big and spread out) compared to EU countries so it's much more challenging.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
by 2015 if the telcos have their way broadband in the US will be defined as 256kbs, and ill be hitching a ride across the puddle
What bothers me about this isn't the free internet. No, that part is pretty cool. What bothers me is the underlying political philosophy. What is a "right?" When do they start? Who creates them?
According to what Jefferson laid out in the Declaration of Independence, rights are inborn into the nature of each person. They are endowed to everyone by their Creator. The distinction here is critical. Rights are inherent in the nature of the human being and an integral part of human dignity -- they are not given by a government. A government cannot give or abolish rights. A person has rights regardless of what his government says. A government can only protect or infringe them.
(That said, a person can abrogate his own rights through the exercise of criminal activity -- this is why governments can licitly infringe on the rights of criminals by imprisoning them.)
Now, if someone has a right to a broadband connection, that means he has always had this right. All humans in all times and places have always had the right to a broadband connection, because this right is a part of their nature. Now, given the fact that broadband connections have not always existed, it's difficult to see how having a broadband connection is an inherent part of human dignity.
It bothers me that lot of Americans seem a bit fuzzy on the concept of rights and are departing more and more from the Locke-Paine-Jefferson school of thought. Ask any given sample of Americans about the subject, and I'll bet 95% of them would say that rights come from the government. A people who look to their government rather to themselves as a source of their rights is a people cowed by tyranny.
I could kiss you for that comment.
The whole thing is crazy. I live in Japan, which is considerably more socialized than the US and... Umm... It's nice. My life is still based on the free market; I can do whatever I want; I can even get really, really wealthy if I so choose/have the opportunity. But my taxes also pay for a lot of great services that come at a fraction of the cost they would if they had to compete.
The US could do all this stuff at the current tax levels, by just slashing the crap out of the military budget, and I'm not talking about body armor or anything we usually think of when we think of the military budget. There is so much pork in there (and yet we still sometimes can't provide our troops with what they need!) that if we cut it all out, we could do really great things for ourselves at the same price.
Taxes aren't bad unless they don't provide value for money. In sane countries, they do.
Why only two adults? What if three consenting adults which to form a civil union?
I'd be a little more sympathetic to this notion if Federal tax brackets were indexed to the cost of living in the area the taxpayer resides.
Why should a family living a pretty lower class lifestyle on $70K a year in the San Francisco pay higher taxes or higher broadband rates to get good broadband to a family living like a king on the same $70K in a nice 2500 square foot house on twenty acres in some remote burg?
People are free to move wherever they want in the US and there are consequences -- higher standard of living for the same money in a remote burg may mean one has to pay more for some services. What next, people in SF should pay for snow removal in Montana?
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
We call them "gays".
All rights are what the majority decides them to be, and always has been. You act like this is unusual.
If the majority, in sufficient numbers, pressed for a new right or repeal of a right via a constitutional amendment, it would happen. That's how it works.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Two things you have to consider though, what defines "the middle of nowhere"? Just outside my town of about 20,000 people, there are many houses that can't get cable, let alone high speed internet. Yeah, 3G internet has made it easier, but every major carrier in the US charges a ton for their service, has terrible latency, has caps and in general provides a crappy way to browse compared to a decent home internet connection.
Secondly, its not that ISPs have done everything on their own and the free market should take its course. We, the taxpayers have (without a direct vote mind you) given them -billions- of dollars to spend on expanding their services, their lines run through public and private ground not owned by the ISP themselves, I think when its -our- money that they spend, we should be able to tell them what to do with it. If they didn't take any of the money directly or indirectly and own the land that their lines pass through, sure, let them do what they want, but no major ISP has done that.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
You say that in a mocking way, but you're actually right. Freedom includes the risk of losing as well as the possibility of winning.
And your only TRULY free if you can walk up to a random guy on the street, knock him out, put him in a cage, hook up electrodes to his genitals and make him the electricity dance for your amusement. If you can't do that, someone's restricting your freedom.
Just because "freedom" lets you do it doesn't make it good.
"Freedom to lose at life" to lose everything and sit cold and sick and hungry under a bridge scrounging for edible garbage while you die of a perfectly curable ailment. What's so great about that that makes it worth defending?
If that's what you get with freedom, I'll pass. Maybe some restrictions aren't so bad. Maybe a the ultra successful should provide a safety net for the ones who lose... sure its not perfect freedom anymore... but perfect freedom is an ugly bitch anyway.
Like anything you need to find a balance. Abolulte freedom in anarchy. Nobody sane really wants that.
While your second argument, that current plans are good in principle but bad in execution, might well be true, it certainly appears that a large number of Americans are opposed to health care reform simply because "government == bad."
Yeah, and obviously the government programs can work if they are set up right, but Obama hasn't made this argument. He hasn't even come close. If he did, then healthcare reform would be a lot more popular.
Yet many (most?) of the world's government health care programs are cheaper and are consistently rated as providing better care than the current US system.
OK, you're conflating two issues here, the first is, why is US healthcare so expensive? and the second is Why is American healthcare so bad? They should be answered separately.
Healthcare is expensive because doctors get paid a lot ($500k for a heart surgeon), because of government insurance mandates (for example, some states require insurance to cover acupuncture and massage therapy. So when you buy insurance you're subsidizing others' massages), because of emergency room costs for uninsured, and because of improving coverage (new treatments like hip replacement surgery that you will be happy for when you get old), among other reasons. Some of these problems can be easily fixed. Why don't we focus on the easy stuff first?
Secondly the US healthcare system is not so bad, if you can get it. Yeah, we hear scary stories, but there are scary stories everywhere. Here's a story of a Canadian coming to America where the service was better. The fact is, if you need a doctor, you're already in a situation where things are bad, and sometimes problems happen, no matter what country you live in. If you are basing your opinion of the quality of US healthcare on our longevity rates, then you've fallen into a logical fallacy, because longevity rates are determined by a number of factors, including smoking, exercise, diet, murder rates, retirement home quality, etc. Going by cure rates, the US does better at curing some diseases than other countries, and does worse in others. Going by responsiveness to patient problems, the US does very well.
Overall the problem is significantly more nuanced than a lot of people understand, but there are some easy solutions available that will make things better immediately. Why don't we focus on these instead of trying to force through a reform of dubious value at a significant cost?
Qxe4
"Maybe a the ultra successful should provide a safety net for the ones who lose."
Welfare? Food Stamps? Medicaid? Public housing?
The poor get all of those. We have a safety net. So are you arguing for a safety net, or are you arguing that government should give people a living?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
You are failing to differentiate between a right that derives from citizenship and a human right. A government can grant the former but not the latter. Or so the theory goes anyway. It's unfortunate that we use the same word for two different things, but I have a feeling that you understand the distinction but are not the type to pass up an opportunity to rant about the evils of government.
So, the one, most dense city on the planet should get everything, and the rest of us should be left out because we aren't providing the most rewarding cost/profit scenario for the utilities?
Even New York, NY can't compare with the population density of several Asian cities. Oh well, no running water for you... Move to a real city if you want service!
In fact, the difference between ISPs falling over themselves to provide service for a given area, versus letting the infrastructure rot, has very little to do with population density, and much more to do with the disposable income of its residents. I know several cities which aren't expecting to get FIOS for the foreseeable future, even though they've got a larger population, and higher density, than the neighboring city when already has FIOS.
Personally, I'd recomend compelling universal coverage, if only for consistency. There are no end of stories of cheap broadband available in a city, but NOT if you're in area X, just because you're across a particular street, on the far side of a lot, etc. The telcos are monopolies, and they know they can string you along for as long as they want before getting around to providing you service, and you won't (can't) just go elsewhere for the service.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
If that's what you get with freedom, I'll pass. Maybe some restrictions aren't so bad. Maybe a the ultra successful should provide a safety net for the ones who lose... sure its not perfect freedom anymore... but perfect freedom is an ugly bitch anyway.
You only have one life. At the end of it, you can say one of two things, you were either a pet, or you made your own decisions. Freedom is the former, and socialism is the latter. No matter how well intended the chains, how nice the cage, you are still wearing chains and living in a cage.
This is my sig.
The right to freedom of speech. For one person to have freedom of speech requires that others refrain from violating it. For example, I can say what I wish, when I wish, and the only requirement imposed upon others is to refrain from stopping me and thus violating that right. The same obligations then extend from me to others. This is a negative right as it requires others to refrain from acting in violation of that right.
The right to broadband. For one person to have this right requires that someone else provide it. This is a positive right as it requires one person/group to act to provide for another (same applies to healthcare "rights", education "rights", etc).
The essential feature here is reciprocity. Negative rights naturally extend to everyone (if person A must refrain from violating the rights of person B, person B must refrain from violating the rights of person A. Otherwise you must assume that one person is "superior", i.e. has more rights, than another), while positive rights are one-sided (one person's "right" to healthcare imposes an obligation on someone else to provide it). The assumption of equality involves assuming that all have the same rights. Presuming that one person has more or different rights than another presupposes that those persons have different worth, and if you start making that assumption, the idea of natural, inalienable rights flies out the window in favor of arbitrary rights determined by an arbitrary group of people based on arbitrary standards. You can't have rights for some at the expense of others. In the case of broadband (or healthcare, or education, etc.), everyone has the same right to work to acquire the resources need to gain access to broadband (or healthcare, or education, etc.). Any other concept imposes positive rights, i.e. rights for some at the expense of others.
Let's analyze this based on what we've learned. You're implying that because he's hungry, this individual has been deprived of his right to food. If he has a right to food, then someone else has a duty to provide it, which means that the provider is a second-class citizen, a slave to anyone who can't provide for themselves. Because he's homeless, someone has violated his right to have a home. Same situation, the provider of the home is reduced to involuntary servitude (slavery), forced to utilize their skills and resources to provide for someone who can't/won't work to provide for themselves. Because he's sick and dying, he has been deprived of his right to medical care. This means that his doctor is his slave, and has to be forced to utilize his knowledge and resources to provide for him.
I'm not saying that if a doctor sees a sick or injured person that they shouldn't attempt to help them. I'm saying that he has no moral obligation to help them. I'm not saying that giving to a charity that helps provide shelter or job training to the homeless is immoral. I'm saying that requiring a person or group to provide for the homeless against their will is immoral.
Dear Citizen,
People feeding you are living in the middle of nowhere.
Just starves retards.
Best regards,
The comity of people living in the middle of nowhere.
You're confusing (or are perhaps unaware of) positive and negative "rights"...
No, I'm not the least bit confused. If anything it is you who are confused, or worse... you are deliberately presenting a false argument.
This means that his doctor is his slave, and has to be forced to utilize his knowledge and resources to provide for him.
The moment you break out the term "slave" you lose ALL credibility whatsoever. The doctor is not his slave in any rational sense.
The doctor doesn't have to show up for work. The doctor doesn't even have to be a doctor. The doctor is not a slave. If he doesn't feel like caring for patients he can quit any time he likes.
The ONLY actual forced imposition on anyone is the taxation used to fund these programs. And sure, you can wave your arms all you like about how your a "slave" in your own country because they make you participate in funding the maintenance of the military too, and the police, and the fire department, and water/sewage, and public schools, and highways, and so on... but I'm not having any of it.
I refuse to be drawn into a debate with any idiot who thinks even the basic trappings of society amount to slavery.
They aren't slavery any more than hiring a contractor to do your kitchen is slavery. The fact that he now has an obligation to you doesn't make him a slave. Participating in a society is a social contract, with obligations to maintain and improve that society. That's not slavery.
Its a hyperbolic misapplication of the word to the point of absurdity.
And for those of us who don't really choose, but just take what we can get? Sure, some (maybe most) of your increase will go to people who have the choice, and who could probably pay for the whole damn thing themselves, but if you think that that's too much trouble to go through to help the people who actually need it, I think you need your moral compass checked out a bit.
I'm not so sure. Let's take a hypothetical: There's a city of 400,000 homes with a concentrated population, the country this city is in has several similar sized cities all with local ISP's providing high quality internet service. Several companies have gone national and are offering services across the cities. In between the cities, however, are many small communities with populations ranging from just a few to a few thousand, there are smaller, less well-off ISP's in some of these communities but they do not have the means or demand to offer service comparable to the ISP's in the city, some of the national ISP's even have a presence in the larger of the small communities but, due to the vastness of the country, the lack of demand and therefore the lack of sustainable revenue or investment recovery expedience they decide to offer a product comparable to the local ISP's. Then the government steps in, having looked at the situation on a map and says "OK, so we've got great speed here cities where there is financial, hi-tech and other business that relies on this technology but in these areas where the primary industries are agriculture and the people making the most noise about speed are either very small businesses or individuals we have slower speeds." an accurate assessment. The conclusion they then come to is "Let's make a law that says the companies have to provide the same service in these low population, low profit profit, low demand areas as in the high profit, high population, high demand areas". A staffer puts his hand up sheepishly and says "Sir, I don't think that'll fly. The companies will want something back". The politician scratches his head and says "We'll just do what we always do and couch it in the language of it being a human right, nobody can object to that". So, in our fictional country the ISP's are _forced_ to provide the same service in the country as they do in the city and the small ISP's in the country are wiped-out or bought up and some of the city specific ISP's go out of business because they can't compete with the new, national infrastructure that one of the trans-city ISP's with a presence in the country built at great cost. A year later the ISP is not seeing return on its investment and goes to the government for a bail out costing the taxpayer money and placing addition financial burdens on the populous. To summarize, when someone says or even implies that "There ought to be a law" there really shouldn't.
I am not sure what you count as Southern Finland, but I live 100km north from Helsinki and we have had plenty of -20C winter days and -30C is not that unusual.
- Raynet --> .
Most US welfare recipients get off welfare within 1 year.
But according to some, we have a huge "welfare state".
I'm telling you, there's something in the water here that's making 30 percent of Americans complete morons. Or maybe it's something being broadcast over the airwaves.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
A right is a legal protection from the power of the government. So, if you have a "right" to a broadband internet connection, that just means the government can't take your broadband away from you. Which is, I've got to say, something I've not heard about being a problem in the USA neither.
By analogy, the "right to keep and bear arms" doesn't mean the government is required to start issuing rifles and ammo to the populace. It just means if you've got one, they can't take it from you.
An entitlement, on the other hand, is something that somebody is obligated to give you. In this case, it seems that the government of Finland is going to pay for stringing cables all over the country -- except for "about 2,000 (households) in far-flung corners of the country", as per the article. Actually, the article is sort of vague about exactly who pays for what. . .
I'm saying the guarantee of a broadband connection for all is meaningless if you don't also have guaranteed access to all legal content on the Internet. When police are able to block perfectly legitimate websites, and do so without even the due process of law, the guarantee itself becomes meaningless. That doesn't mean the connection is worthless in practice -- only that the guarantee is worthless.
Having said that, I'm happy to find out the filter has been nearly abandoned by Finnish ISPs.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."