Post by @paul
It took a little while, but my petition has finally been published on the UK Parliament petitions website! 🎉
Make all UK Government websites free to access without mobile data charges
For people experiencing data poverty, accessing essential government services can come with a very real cost.
Whether someone is claiming benefits, accessing health services, looking for work, finding safety advice, or simply trying to understand their rights. I don’t believe they should have to pay for mobile data to access public services they have already helped fund through taxation.
The petition calls for UK Government websites and online services to be zero-rated, meaning they would not use a person’s mobile data allowance or require them to have paid data available.
If you agree that public services should be free at the point of access, please consider signing and sharing the petition. Every signature helps! 🙏
@draxil@social.linux.pizza
@TheRealNooshu@hachyderm.io
Yep, also signed!
Frankly these days data is so cheap for mobile operators that I'd prefer they offer unlimited and fair usage/throttling for over-users so nobody is ever without a data connection, but having government websites be completely unrestricted is a great call!
@paul @TheRealNooshu I assume they already have the infra for this anyway, I think I can access the provider's website for top-up when I have no data, so they presumably could use that same system.
@draxil@social.linux.pizza @TheRealNooshu@hachyderm.io
Yeah, they have to, right?!
Doesn't matter who the business is, a network is a network. Something like a bit of getting the traffic on a nocharge chain, QoS or proxying may do it. Or even just adding the .gov.uk urls to a no-charge accounting database lookup. Can't be difficult