[ga] Attack on the At-Large

[Danny Younger <dannyyounger@xxxxxxxxx>]

As many of you have heard by now, ISOC has just established a membership fee of US$75 annually.  This is a calculated attack on participating at-large users worldwide.  Consider the following reaction to this fee:
 
Our chapter covers 23 countries, a giant chunk of our planet that we refer to here as the liquid continent. There are more than 1200 languages spoken in the region within hundreds of diverse cultures. The Internet is for Everyone means that all of these people have the right to be ISOC members. Any kind of membership fee, even if it was only one dollar, would cut this entire region off from ISOC. Then ISOC would have to change it's slogan to "The Internet is for anyone who has a credit card to pay the membership fee".

I'm sitting here looking out my window, and through the dense jungle I can just barely see my neighbor's house through the Kafika trees, and can just barely make out the little wifi antenna that's pointed to our Alofi repeater two miles away. And somebody in that house is sitting there surfing the web or checking their email. (I know this because I'm the ISP here and I can see that they're online).

Now here's a person who makes around $3500 US dollars a year (more than a lot of Pacific Islanders), and somehow they've managed to get a computer and still have enough money left over to keep food on their table because they wanted communications so badly that they did what they had to do to get online. The Internet is free in Niue but they still have to buy their own computer. And when somebody on such a small income does that, it shows how dedicated they are to wanting the Internet.

Now, tell me how I'm going to ask that person for $75 US dollars, and tell me what they're going to get from ISOC for their $75. Because that person that I'm looking at right now, IS the "Everyone" in ISOC's "Internet is for everyone" slogan.

Asking people like that to pay to be a member of ISOC simply means they aren't going to be a member of ISOC.

And then "The Internet is for Everyone" needs to be changed to "The Internet is for Everyone, but ISOC is not". ;-)
http://lists.isoc.org/archives/chapter-delegates/200503/msg00042.html
 
 

		
---------------------------------
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday! 
 Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web