Walk down any high street in the world and observe what you are charged for. You pass the bakery, the bookshop, the café, the tailor. You look in the windows. You read the menus. You browse. Nobody sends you a bill for any of it. The café charges you when you drink the coffee. The restaurant charges you when you eat the meal. The shop charges you when you buy the shirt. Payment happens at the moment of consumption — never at the moment of looking.
And notice the other half of the bargain, because it matters just as much. Nobody pays to look at you. Your presence on the street — visible, reachable, able to be greeted, found and done business with — costs you nothing and costs them nothing. The street is free in both directions. We pay to consume. We do not pay to look, and we do not pay to be seen.
Online, we have accepted the exact inversion of this rule, and we have accepted it so completely that we no longer notice it. We pay simply to walk the street. Every glance at a webpage, every message received, every moment of bare presence on the network is metered by the gigabyte and billed to the individual. We pay to look. We pay to be looked at. We pay, in effect, per step on the pavement — and we have been doing so for forty years without once asking why.
On the street, we pay to consume — never to look, and never to be seen. Online, we have accepted the exact inversion, and stopped noticing.
The Internet was built as a commons. Its protocols — TCP/IP, the Domain Name System, the web itself — were developed with public research money, through volunteer standards bodies, by unpaid contributors at universities and laboratories. Tim Berners-Lee refused to patent the World Wide Web; he gave it to humanity. None of this was the work of the telecommunications industry.
What the carriers built is real, but narrower: the access layer. The towers, the fibre, the submarine cables, the engineers who climb masts in the rain. The road, in other words — not the country the road leads to. That road is expensive, it depreciates, and the people who operate it are entitled to be paid. The question is only how they should be paid, and to whom we send the bill.
Every other essential medium answers that question the same way. Roads, pavements, street lighting, water mains, the postal network: all built at vast expense, all operated by entities that must be compensated, and all funded collectively — through taxation, universal-service obligations and cross-subsidy — precisely so that the medium can be free at the point of use. The shops and stalls on top of it then charge for what is consumed. The medium is funded collectively; the services are priced individually. Every piece of essential infrastructure humanity has ever built at scale runs on this principle.
The retail mobile-data industry does the opposite. It meters the medium itself: per-gigabyte billing for the bare act of sending and receiving packets, regardless of what those packets carry. A tollbooth on the pavement. A category error on the wrong layer of the stack.
What can legitimately be priced sits one layer up — the things we actually consume. Streaming, gaming, cloud storage, enterprise software, premium connectivity with guaranteed performance. These are services, with differentiated quality and discretionary demand. Charge for them. What should never have been priced at the individual level is presence on the network itself — the ability to look, and to be seen.
The error came by inheritance. Mobile data arrived in the late 1990s as an appendage to voice telephony, which was already billed by the minute. The carriers simply extended the meter: the gigabyte became the new minute. Nobody designed the model from first principles, and for a while it scarcely mattered, because mobile Internet was a luxury. Those who could afford it bought it; those who could not missed little more than sports scores.
That world is gone. In 2026, Internet access is the precondition for participation in modern life — banking, healthcare, education, employment, government, family. To be offline today is to be locked out of the society you live in. We are governing a utility with a pricing model built for a luxury, and the cost of the mismatch is now the exclusion of two-thirds of humanity.
Let me be precise, because this is the heart of it. In much of Africa, the bottom two-thirds of the population cannot afford retail mobile data at current prices; in some markets a single gigabyte costs more than a day’s median wage. Hundreds of millions of people hold working phones they cannot afford to put data on. They stand at the edge of the street, forbidden to walk down it.
Nothing technological forbids their entry. The infrastructure could serve them today. The marginal cost of one additional gigabyte across an already-built network is a fraction of a cent; retail prices sit two and three orders of magnitude above it. Physics permits their inclusion. The pricing model forbids it.
Nor is any of this the product of carrier malice. No operator can unilaterally abandon retail metering without surrendering margin to rivals who keep it. Every carrier is locked in by every other carrier; every regulator has deferred to incumbents; no alternative funding architecture has emerged because nobody inside the system has the incentive or the standing to build one. The people who run these networks are, in my experience, technically excellent and personally honest. They are operators inside a market structure they did not design and cannot alone correct.
If Internet access is the precondition for modern citizenship — and in 2026 it plainly is — then the billions currently priced out of it are being denied the conditions of participation in the world they actually live in, confined by a pricing choice that nobody with the standing to correct it has been willing to confront.
Consider the arithmetic of the reverse. Africa’s economy is worth roughly three trillion dollars today. Lift the ration — treat access as the layer of public infrastructure it has become everywhere else — and that economy can credibly double within seven years, on nothing more exotic than the empowerment of the youngest and fastest-growing workforce on the planet, freed to trade, learn, borrow, and build on the same terms as the rest of humanity.
The street teaches us the rule, and it has always been the right one. Pay for what is consumed. Never for looking, never for being seen. The access layer should be free. The services on top of it should be priced.
I am going to make Internet access free for everyone.