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Friday, December 22nd, 2017

UK Government moves to classify high-speed broadband access as a “legal right”

Author:     Rich Haridy
Source:     New Atlas
Publication Date:     20 December 2017
 Link: UK Government moves to classify high-speed broadband access as a “legal right”
Stephan:   Everyday as I go through 100s of stories looking for those that rise to usage in SR, I am struck again and again by how the rest of the world is going in one direction while the United States under Trump and his administration are moving in another.  You can see this in "big" stories like the U.N. vote today in which essentially the world called the threat made by Trump and Nikki Haley that they "were taking names" of those who voted against Trump's decision about moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. You can see it in the reaction to Trump's decision to withdraw America from the Paris climate change agreement. But you can also see it in the policy decisions being made in different countries about things like internet access. The Trump zombies engineered the end of net neutrality, and the results of that policy change will become ever more dramatic in the months to come. Meanwhile there are stories like this one from the U.K..

Hot on the heels of the FCC’s net neutrality repeal, the UK Government has offered up a new regulation to classify internet access as a “legal right”
Credit: stori/Depositphotos

The UK Government has just announced that from 2020, high-speed broadband will be considered a legal right for all its citizens, meaning service providers must offer access to any person that requests it.  (emphasis added) The announcement follows a proposal from BT, the UK’s largest telecommunications provider, to provide universal broadband coverage to all areas of the UK under a voluntary agreement. The Government, however, felt the importance of universal broadband access required a regulatory hand in the matter.

Called the Universal Service Obligation (USO), this regulation will be sketched out in detail over the coming months but the current announcement stipulates that everyone in the UK must have access to a broadband connection of at least 10 Mbps by 2020.

The move by the UK Government comes at an interesting time, literally days after the FCC in the United States repealed the Obama-era […]

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1 Comment

  1. Mark R on Saturday, December 23, 2017 at 4:18 pm

    Of course the government wants the DARPA invented internet (or was that Al Gore??) to be extended to all…so much easier to spy on you and vacuum your data. Not sure what is taking the U.S. so long to enforce these noble goals with codified threat of violence from the police state!?