A website standard that is affordable to the poorest demographics in developing countries?

The Subsecretaria de Telecomunicaciones of Chile ruled that zero-rating services like Wikipedia Zero, Facebook Zero, and Google Free Zone, that subsidize mobile data usage, violate net neutrality laws and had to end the practice by June 1, 2014.

Wait, what?

David Meyer expresses a similar conviction in GigaOm, writing, “Broadly, though, it has the makings of a strategic disaster, stopping Facebook (and any other social network or messaging service) from entrenching itself in the mobile market in an unassailable way. And in the long term, for consumers, that is a very good thing indeed.”

Oh. Interesting.

I use a Chromebook, man, and my phone is a Nexus. You can't get more chromey and googley than that.

Heck, sometimes the network gets crappy at my home, here in Spain, because of interference or because too many devices are anchored to the one router; even with a 50Mbps optic fibre connection, sometimes gmail will take five full minutes to load if I'm in my room. Networks can get slow anywhere.

I do believe that optimizing for low bandwidth and low CPU and RAM usage is universally useful. Slow-network problems can pop up anywhere. Plus, not everyone has the wealth to buy more than low-end machines.

It's just that the issue is exacerbated to the extreme in third-world countries, and one can't tell them "you should buy more expensive stuff" and "you should get more googley gear".

I agree with Ritalin, and I suggest you try the internet in developing countries firsthand to get a taste of what it's like. It doesn't have anything to do with the browser version.

I've been giving some thought to your "official rights to X result in governments taking ineffectual measures that result in people not getting X". I think it can be argued that if the measures stop people from getting X, they are vulnerating people's rights to get X in the first place, and are therefore "illegal". Does that make sense?

I also consulted my brother on this, who actually studies Law. His answer amounted to a very harried "It's a fracking mess. only experts can 'sort of' make sense of it."

... A thought just occurred to me. Just thinking out loud here. Do "fundamental rights" matter in the same way that religious dogma does? I mean, do they operate in a similar way, in terms of their tangible consequences on people's daily lives? Ecclesiastical Law. International Law. The Vatican. The UN. Dogma. Inarguable principles. Doctrine. Rampant hypocrisy and yet immense respect and authority. Saint vs. Merchant interactions.

Maybe I'm missing a vital difference, but the more I'm thinking about this, the more there seems to be a parallel of sorts...

whether it's the job of the government and the government should regulate it

There are many ways to abuse and hurt your clients when you are a private business (especially a big, powerful one versus small, isolated, impoverished populations), but this is also true of a corrupt, uncaring, incompetent or oppressive government. It is also true that there needs to be a normalized, systematic way of sorting these problems and right any wrongs that might arise, but, again, any sort of normative (legislative?), deliberative (judiciary?), and enforcing (executive) organization is liable to be, again, corrupt, uncaring, incompetent, oppressive, etc.

Debating these things in principle seems rather pointless. The correct answer is "whatever gets the job done". Saying "people have a right to X" is simply a lofty way of saying "it's very important and urgent that people get X".

What seems obvious is that it's not a matter of over-regulation or under-regulation (how does one quantify regulation anyway? what qualifies as "just regulated enough"?), but rather of well-thought-out regulation versus ill-conceived one. This is highly dependent on who's doing the regulating, their competence, the means at their disposal, what they actually want to optimize the regulations for (government empowerment? private profit? helping some specific clients, cronies, sponsors? impeding access to the service while appearing to provide it? there are so many possibilities of betrayal... the interests of the end users might not come up at all in their calculations), who gets to enforce the regulations and the means put at their disposal to do so, and so on and so forth.

to declare internet a human right and let it be subject to heavy regulation

That feels like a bit of a non-sequitur. Declaring that people are entitled to something results in people not getting that something?

people who don't have access to electricity because of overregulation

This also seems strange; all the cooperation projects I'm working on are NGO-based and the electricity is locally-generated, and often locally-owned. The reason the national electric network doesn't get there is that the villages are too distant and isolated, and the houses are too dispersed from each other, for the investment to be worthwhile.

How would deregulation help? By allowing thinner cables that employ less copper or aluminium? By letting cables hang lower? I'm genuinely curious.

At any rate, "regulation" of some sort and to some degree is inherent to the Internet. It's a world that lives and breathes protocols, standards, documentation, and proper procedure. There's also a lot of room for decentralization and improvisation, but there will always be a need for rules of some sort, whether the investors are private or public, foreign or local, big or small, if only as a reference point of what to do when something goes wrong.