Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

eng
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
ship may be distinct from those of economy and ICT market and is concerned with
production expansion or competitiveness between companies. It must ensure local
communication networks, for example, with voice and data transmission, providing
good quality multimedia services to the entire population.
The latest technology in telecommunication networks break through the current
model of oligopolistic market structure in which it works with visions of a
natural monopoly and the fast technological change process hinders a non-exclusive
policy. The dissemination of telecenters experiences put more concretely the access
grant to telecommunications services, with quality standards and regularity adequate
to its purpose, anywhere in the country, in contrast to a regulation merely
focused on the competitive structure of market .
Besides the experiences of telecenters and depending on the limited action of the
service providers on not providing access in areas that weren’t niche markets, such as
the poorer areas of the metropolitan areas and small towns far from big cities, many
cities have sought alternative means to reduce Internet access costs through new
network architectures that incorporate systems for wireless transmission. The social
appropriation of new wireless technologies enabled the development of community
networks that broke through with access barriers imposed by the market areas defined
by the service providers.
With more flexible and hybrid technologies, adapted to local realities, the deployment
of an infrastructure for broadband Internet access allows for an effective
democratization of technology for people. These networks, considered as an asset
of the community, indicate a path of social ownership that understands the digital
inclusion as the population's access to the knowledge society and as an extremely
important dimension in building an active citizenship. In this arrangement, one
sees the possibility for citizens to search for information, select it, classify it, at
will, transforming his/her reality, interfering with quality in the existing democratic
spaces, or creating new ones for the improvement of individual life, the community
organization and local development.
The right to the city and the digital cities
The digital inclusion perspective as the integration of communities to the knowledge
society must be materialized by spreading and ensuring the right to informa-
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