Author: Armin Medosch

[Excerpt from ‘My personal journey with free networks’ presented at the Freifunk Summer Convention, Berlin in 2003]

For my talk at the 2003 Open Cultures conference in Vienna, I developed a communication model of network freedom. It is a layered model. At the bottom is the layer of network freedom – the freedom to build networks on a physical and material level. Many things affect this freedom. One is the availability of technology, another that of free spectrum. We should lobby regulatory authorities to make more free spectrum available.

On the next level there is the freedom of access. Access is also defined multiply. Price is a factor; another is technical skills; a very important one is availability – large portions of rural populations have no chance of getting broadband Internet because of their location. The telcos run up huge profits by selling us short. For example, today only 3% of laid optical fibre is actually used. If the market were really free, then so would bandwidth be – there is no scarcity of resource. Clearly, there is something wrong with the way the market operates.

Free Networks strongly fulfil the requirements of these two basic layers (physical/material and access). But they can also play an important role at higher levels. The third layer is the freedom to communicate – to communicate what I want with whom I want, free of the restrictions of gatekeepers and the surveillance ambitions of governments. We should be able to use whatever network protocols are out there, to invent our own protocols. Essentially the expression of freedom of speech in network-based communications, this freedom is under threat from many sides – the war against terror, the war on file-sharing and the many other wars our societies are waging against themselves.

The fourth layer is the layer of media freedom – the freedom to use these networks not only for individual communication but also as collective means of exercising our right to freedom of speech. Media freedom has been delegated to television moguls and state broadcasting corporations. Large segments of society are not represented. The Net promised to improve this situation, but we have witnessed serious regression in the last few years. The promises of an open networked society are still worthwhile, but will not be delivered by Bertelsmann, Murdoch or Berlusconi.

[republished in: Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel (eds.), Ambient Information Systems, AIS Ltd., London, 2009]