Does Internet access rise to the level of a human right?
Posted at 5:00 AM on January 25, 2010
by Eric Ringham
(11 Comments)
Filed under: International affairs, Science/Technology
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week invoked Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan in a major speech on Internet freedom. She said all humanity must have equal access to knowledge and ideas. Today's Question: Does Internet access rise to the level of a human right?
Comments texted to MPR:
You should be able to go where ever you want on the Internet. It is a human right. -anonymous
Everyone should get the Internet in America. No other country should get it though. -anonymous
Comments (11)
No. Internet access is like health care, certainly a want but not a right.
Full access to the internet isn't a right, unless we as a society move 100% of all communication, information storage, etc. there.
The real question isn't about access to the internet, but about affordable, readily avaiable access. It easily costs three times as much to have the internet at home in rural MN than it does in the Twin Cities- on average about $100/month. Now, with an average of 17% unemployment in rural MN, how many Minnesotians will be able to continue to afford that?
No, internet access is not a human right.
The concern in China is not a matter of access, but a matter of access being monitored/censored to suport the political establishment and persecute those in opposition.
Political oppression is the crime. Freedom of speech is the right being violated.
No, I don't think the internet should be called a human right. Human rights, to me, are the basics of life, like clean water, food, shelter, some kind of health care. The internet is, primarily, information. We all get information every day. In developed countries, we can do research at libraries. Interestingly, no one has ever called libraries a human right. In any society of the world, the information needed for survival is available, whether from the people at the public market, or from next-door neighbors, or from watching the sky to see what the weather will be like. Humans have existed for centuries without the internet. How could it suddenly become a human right? No way. No more than cell phones, I-pods, Blackberries, DS's, lasik surgery, or designer coffee, can be called human rights.
Is it really necessary to call something a "human right" in order to protect it?
Can't we say that censorship is wrong and harmful without saying that open access to information on the Internet is a "right" that belongs to all people? I would agree that the ability to seek knowledge and information freely is important, but framing it in terms of a specific technology is probably not wise in any case.
Right now we aren't even doing a good job of protecting some really fundamental rights - rights to speak your mind without fear of reprisal, to be protected from torture at the hands of government officials, to have equal access to jobs and education regardless of race or gender. Let's not be too hasty to expand the list of rights we fail to uphold.
Internet use and access are undoubtedly hallmarks of modern communication and, by extension, modern society. If rights such as those expounded in the Bill or Rights as fundamental human rights of a modern society, or many other things which continually mark modern notions of 'rights' such as access to education or equality among the sexes, then we must consider how internet access falls within that spectrum. In my mind, denying internet access is as denying a modern right.
All the information on the internet should be a human right as the internet is the technological virtual representation of humans the world-over. Until the internet is a free-network, however, it will never be a right because humans don't pay for their rights.
I will go with .... NO!
If you cannot better YOURSELF to the at least the point of going to the Pubic Library then maybe our friend Darwin should pay a call.
DTOM
Maybe not a right. But we defiantly need every American to be able to access the internet. It's to everyone's benefit.
I think we would do well to reign in our temptation as a free, developed country to expand the scope of what we consider "human rights." Scope creep confuses and dilutes the paramount significance of the fundamental rights of life, liberty, property, expression, due process, etc, that are worth dying for, and does a severe disservice to efforts to secure and defend those rights for the oppressed.
No more than a college education has....it's necessary to survive in the western marketplace, is cost prohibitive to the vast majority of the world's population & another way in which we have created a class to keep those we deem, mostly because of socio-economic status, undesirable out.
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