Rick Mahn had an interesting comment on my post from earlier about the decline and fall of of our Internet Age here in the west. It was one specific thought he raised though that caught my attention and got me thinking further on the whole thing. In his comment he said “…Nuances between Canada and the US are irrelevant in these cases since we’re tightly intertwined on our infrastructure (and more)….”

It was the use of the word infrastructure that made me sit back for a minute sipping my coffee letting my thoughts meander for a moment with the idea of infrastructures at the center of that mental wandering. After all what does infrastructure refer to? When we use the word in the context of society we think of things like roads, power, social services - in other words the necessities of life.

The availability of unfettered access to travel while once may have been considered a luxury of the wealthy has now become a necessity of life. Every day we travel from home to office or from one continent to another because we need or want to. So in effect all methods of travel have become a part of our social infrastructure - a requirement to be a functional part of our society.

At one time the telephone was considered to be a luxury that only the richest of us could afford; now, though it has become a necessity of life without which we would not be able to function as a part of our society. Like travel, communication has become an integral part of our social infrastructure and without this ubiquitous access to communications we are looked upon by society in general as a fringe person, almost a non-entity.

As roads, rail and air travel have become the lifeblood that flows through our society keeping it alive the communication and power networks could be considered to be the nervous and synaptic byways that keep us growing - moving forward with new ideas and concepts. They are all an integral part of our social and physical infrastructure that are interdependent on each other to the point that if one fails it can lead to a cascading effect of the others failing as well.

All these things that make up the daily infrastructure we find ourselves maneuvering through were considered to be luxuries only afforded to those with money but over time they have become social and physical necessities of life for all of us and the same can be said now for universal broadband access to the Internet.

Sure when the Internet first started even the idea of dial-up access was something that only those with means could afford the cost. As faster and faster speeds became available and corporations became more involved the availability of access became something that even regular everyday folks could almost afford. Even then though access to the Internet was considered a luxury item. It was not a part of our social infrastructure.

Then came the meeting of two trends - the greater availability of computers due to greater reductions of manufacturing costs and the coming online of broadband access to the Internet. Suddenly computers were priced at a point where they became in integral part of our daily lives both at home and at work. They were moving from being a luxury item to becoming a necessity of life. Tied in with that was the explosion of the Internet as more and more people began to see that this new method communication was becoming as important as the telephone.

Today access to the internet is in that transitional place of once being considered a luxury to now becoming a part of our social and physical infrastructure. The problem though is that it is still being controlled by corporations that are refusing to let the transition take place. While these corporations try to entrench themselves with government bodies in order to protect their luxury profits the rest of the world is coming to grasp with the fact that access to the Internet is now an integral part of our infrastructure and needs to be treated as such.

Even individual States within the US are beginning to see this as if evident with California’s recent announcement to provide broadband access to everyone in the state. As the post on Ars Technica has quoted the California Broadband Task Force:

concluded that broadband has become a piece of “critical infrastructure” for the state and that government should get involved in funding its further deployment.

The time has come for both governments and corporations to realize that treating Internet access as a luxury that while making their pockets fuller is putting us all at a disadvantage when competing on the world stage. It is time for them all to realize that access to the Internet is a part of our ever developing social and physical infrastructures.

Conversation Tags: Internet, infrastructure