Internet Access Is a Human Right, Says United Nations

http://mashable.com/2012/07/06/internet-human-right/

by taylorbuley • 14 years ago

110 75 14 years ago

The concept of "rights" is growing less useful, I fear.

qq66• 14 years ago

The resolution doesn't seem to say "Everyone should get free Internet." It says something to the effect of "Restricting people's online expression is a violation of their rights," condemning what Syria or Egypt's governments did when they shut down Internet to prevent citizens from coordinating revolutionary activities.

kiba• 14 years ago

They might as well just say "freedom of expression".

smsm425• 14 years ago

Are they going to issue press-release on every possible form of expression? That'd take a while, but then again - generating headlines is their business, so it's a win-win.

tikhonj• 14 years ago

No it isn't. The point isn't that you should get free internet--the point is that a government should not prevent you from freely using the internet. This is no different from a right to, say, travel.

The internet is particularly important because it is very good for getting a message out to the world at large. Other existing channels tend to be more difficult to use or more limited. The internet lets people document current events first-hand without having to rely on reporters or news organizations.

So there are definitely some completely rational and practical reasons to declare internet access an international right, at the very least as a check against oppressive government.

spindritf• 14 years ago

> The point isn't that you should get free internet--the point is that a government should not prevent you from freely using the internet.

Isn't that already covered under freedom of speech?

kevinpet• 14 years ago

That's not what someone means when they say "every child has a right to an education". They do not mean "the government cannot prevent you from getting an education". They mean "the government must provide you with an education".

No one has a right to travel. It's actually phrased as the right to freedom of movement, which is a good confusing phrase because it prevents you from thinking you already know what it means. You have (in a free country) the right to go where you want. You don't have the right to a plane ticket.

Positive rights are dangerous. Positive rights inherently impose obligations on someone. They should be phrased that way to begin with. I can rationally discuss the idea of "education is an obligation of government" because it means what it says. If I dare say "children don't have a right to an education" I'll get lynched.

taylorbuley• 14 years ago

One distinction philosophers make is "positive" (freedom of) vs. "negative" (freedom from) liberty.

If you take this as the former, then perhaps I agree. But I suspect this was intended to be the latter -- i.e. freedom from ignorance.

mthreat2• 14 years ago

As someone who was once banned from the Internet by the US gov't[1], I actually agree with you. People throw around terms like "human right" without knowing what it means. If access to the Internet is a human right, that means every human in the world should be able to demand access to the Internet?

I think the Internet absolutely should receive First Amendment protection in the US (and the US Supreme Court agrees), but calling it a human right doesn't seem to agree with the definition[2]. I'd love to hear arguments for the other side.

Note that this doesn't mean I think governments should be able to actively deny individuals access to the Internet, but a Constitutional right is not the same as a human right.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lamprecht

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights

mthreat2• 14 years ago

Another point - people in prison still deserve "human rights", even though they've lost their right to freedom. This implies that even freedom isn't a human right. Of course, you could argue that this leads to a contradiction about taking away one's freedom, but that's another discussion.

saraid21611• 14 years ago

> If access to the Internet is a human right, that means every human in the world should be able to demand access to the Internet?

You seem to be asking this rhetorically, but I don't see what your objection to people being allowed to demand access to the Internet is. Could you actually spell it out?

barrkel• 14 years ago

"If access to the Internet is a human right, that means every human in the world should be able to demand access to the Internet?"

Does freedom of speech mean everyone should be able to demand access to a printing press?

jsnk• 14 years ago

This is actually an area for a long-lasting philosophical debate. Here's is a paper by Isaiah Berlin [1] on the debate over positive and negative liberty.

>The first of these political senses of freedom or liberty (I shall use both words to mean the same), which (following much precedent) I shall call the ‘negative’ sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’ The second, which I shall call the positive sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference, that can determine someone to do, or be, one thing rather than another?’ The two questions are clearly different, even though the answers to them may overlap.

[1] http://www1.nsd131.org/classpages/bwilliamson/Shared%20Docum...

scarmig• 14 years ago

Some other philosophers question whether there's even a meaningful difference between positive and negative rights. Those critiques go beyond a mere, "well, it's meaningless for the rich and the poor to have equal rights to use any printing presses they own."

What is one of the main arguments against that distinction? Well, consider: many people here are arguing that the Internet isn't a right because someone has to provide or pay for it. In some sense, it's not a "natural" right in the same way that they perceive, say, property rights to be.

But when you say you have property rights, you're not just saying that the government won't come and take your stuff. You're saying that the government has a positive obligation to send violent thugs in uniform to protect a monopoly, of use and transfer, over a physical object that it has recognized for you. (After all, otherwise a right to private property would be meaningless.)

That leads the people making the initial positive/negative distinction into an intellectual trap: all of a sudden, their negative liberty has shown its true colors. It requires as much government involvement as, say, the universal provision of healthcare service. Or the Internet! Even freedom of speech requires government action to uphold: it's pretty meaningless to have freedom of speech if the government won't back up its guarantee of force on individuals who would harm you for saying something.

aszepieniec• 14 years ago

Just who is going to use violence against whom so that whose rights are not violated?

adventureful• 14 years ago

Going to have to start by proclaiming that several other things are human rights before you get to Internet access.

Access devices are a human right. Electricity is a human right. Access to telecom lines (of some sort) is a human right. Access to mobile or a spot to plug into is a human right. Transistors are a human right. Storage is a human right. Some kind of electronic or digital display is a human right.

kkowalczyk• 14 years ago

First, this is a set not a list so it's nonsensical to rank those in importance.

More to the point, I don't read that proclamation as "everyone is entitled to internet access".

I read it as: no-one (specifically government) should be able to take away your access to internet.

The difference is not that subtle.

It's important because it counters a growing world-wide tendency to take away your access after some minor infractions like copyright infringement.

It rightly recognizes that access to internet is almost a necessity to conduct your daily business (in first world countries, at least) and denying that access creates incredible hardship and can ruin lives (ruin not at all rhetorically; if you, for example, make money via etsy or odesk, taking away this income might push you over the poverty line).

saraid21611• 14 years ago

I don't find this as absurd as you make it out to be.

Let's do it.

ctdonath2• 14 years ago

There is a difference between the right of not being prevented from doing something, vs. the right to force others to facilitate someone doing something. The right to acquire and use something at your own cost as you see fit is one thing, forcing others via state police powers to pay for and provide those things to you is another.

Know the difference, lest people argue about different things.

smashing• 14 years ago

You forgot uptime because none of that is worth anything if the system isn't running, and someone has to be available to make that happen 24/7.

roryokane2• 14 years ago

The Chinese delegate stipulated that the “free flow of information on the Internet and the safe flow of information on the Internet are mutually dependent” while signing the resolution. I think his supposed reasoning is that if people are scared of encountering “unsafe” things on the Internet, they will avoid the Internet and thus lose opportunities for speech. But that still seems pretty unconvincing – I’m having trouble understanding how the rest of the Human Rights Council can let China pretend to support the resolution when it has such a weak defense for its censorship policy.

gogobyte• 14 years ago

The problem is I despise UN because it is an organization of dictatorships mainly, and extremely corrupted one.

accountswu2• 14 years ago

You mean it's a dictatorship run by the minority rich western white countries that force their imperialism on the majority of the world through the various arms of UN? That the US is able to impose sanctions on Iraq and now Iran even though the majority of the world is opposed to the sanctions? That the US is able to shield Israel from any sanctions despite its grave violations of human rights, its refusal to end the military occupation, its refusal to allow Palestinians to have their land back (whether 1967-occupied 22% or the 1948-occupied 78%), its refusal to allow the right of return to non-Jews who were kicked out in 1948 (under UN law the refugees forced out or those left voluntarily have the right to return) and its insistence to allow Jewish immigrants to settle in the land being stolen every day by demolishing homes and evicting non-Jewish owners?

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/07/state-dept-says-it-is-not-cons...

MS. NULAND: We have no reason to believe that it is not credible. It’s based on eyewitness accounts, and they’re reporting from a broad cross-section of human rights figures inside Syria.

QUESTION: So the next time Human Rights Watch comes out with a report that’s critical of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, I’ll assume that you’re going to be saying the same thing, correct; that you think that the report is credible, it’s based on eyewitness accounts?

MS. NULAND: As --

QUESTION: And you’re not going to say that it’s politically motivated and should be dismissed?

MS. NULAND: Matt, as you have made clear again and again in this room, we are not always consistent.

https://www.google.com/search?q=peaceful+settlement+of+the+q...

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/resolving-the-israel-palest...

Year

Vote

[Yes-No-Abstained]

Negative votes cast by… 2005

156-6-9

Israel, United States , Australia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau

2006

157-7-10

Israel, United States , Australia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau

2007

161-7-5

Israel, United States , Australia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau

sirclueless3• 14 years ago

The depressing but true fact is that the U.S. wields more military power than the rest of the world combined. Not everyone thinks this is a bad thing: there are some cogent arguments that the lengthy peace enjoyed in Europe since WWII has been largely due to the constantly present American military force and economic hegemony. Countries in Europe and Asia are willing to stomach U.S. presence because the U.S. has not been an imperial power since Palau in 1947 (and, excluding Liberia circa 1840-something, it has never had a mainland colony).

It's obvious that the U.S. will never try to wrest sovereignty from a stable Western-style representative government, so countries are willing to let the U.S. solve the so-called "Security Dilemma" for them. If this means giving them effective veto power over U.N. resolutions for such time as they retain a military hegemony, so be it. There are a lot of benefits to having a hegemon in power, and as Empires go, the American Empire is relatively benign unless you think that American cultural influence will destroy the world or something.

brc2• 14 years ago

Exactly. I wouldn't mind the right to tell the UN they don't have a claim over me and I don't accept their laws. But somehow I can't find the ballot paper that gives me this.

Even if you think of the UN as a benign force of good, you still have no way of removing yourself from it.

Each citizen in a country has the possibility and the right to switch to another country, if, for whatever reason, they cannot abide by that countrys laws. This stretches from religious freedom to tax freedom. Yet it's impossible to escape the UN, and, as many people find out the hard way, when the UN passes a rule that ruins your life, you can't vote for the other guy.

My take is that every country should have to hold a periodic (say 10 year) referendum of whether to stay in the UN and continue to fund its programs. Happily, this would easily pass. But it would be nice to think that a citizen can enforce some accountability on the largest government of them all.

sigzero2• 14 years ago

The UN can say it all it wants. That doesn't make it true.

alan_cx2• 14 years ago

You too, right? And round and round we go....

scott_meade• 14 years ago

The motion does not say that Internet access is a human right.

The gist of the motion is captured in the affirmation that "the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice" [http://www.regeringen.se/content/1/c6/19/64/51/6999c512.pdf]

The UN is simply affirming that the media through which a expression is conveyed should not change the understanding that freedom of expression is a human right.

sirclueless3• 14 years ago

Not just the form of media, but also communication across sovereign borders. That is, Egypt can't make a media bubble and say, "Sure, our citizens are free to use the internet to express whatever opinions they like to other Egyptians. It just has to be on the Egyptian twitter on Egyptian servers."

aioprisan• 14 years ago

I hope that we won't be forced to sign up for Internet service or pay additional taxes to allow for this human right to be spread and given to everyone as part of a government mandate- I mean tax- by buying the service from private companies.. All kidding aside, how much do you want to bet that in the next 10 years, we'll all be mandated to purchase or pay for Internet access?

ctdonath2• 14 years ago

The USA Constitution was way ahead - by some 225 years - with its "1st Amendment" protection of freedom of speech, of press (publishing), and of association. Gorvernmental interference of what someone says, how someone says it, and who they work with to say it, has long been prohibited. Nice to see the UN catch up. Notice, however, the difference between not interfering vs. forcing others to facilitate : negative vs. positive rights.

twelvechairs• 14 years ago

This isn't really 'catching up' in the way you say. The UN declaration of human rights already says "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.".

This move by the UN seems a deliberate point to ensure 'the internet' cannot be excluded from these bounds. I'm not sure the USA has yet been so explicit.

As a side point for educative purposes only - the US bill of rights was not the first to enshrine freedom of speech and press for a country - that was the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (though both built on the English bill of rights, which enshrined freedom of speech for parliamentarians).

maratd• 14 years ago

> the US bill of rights was not the first to enshrine freedom of speech

No, of course not. We all get our ideas from somewhere. Much of American law and concepts come from English common law. The English picked it up from the Romans and Germans. So on and so forth.

However, the US bill of rights is certainly the longest lasting. It is my understanding that the US constitution is the oldest constitution that is still in effect.

zacharycohn• 14 years ago

So how do this and "3 strikes" rules (when your ISP kills your internet connection because you got caught pirating 3 times) get along?

alan_cx2• 14 years ago

US or EU? As an EU resident, I see the 3 strikes being, er, well, struck out after years of court battles and misery for users.

Interestingly, as far as I can tell, the 3 strikes thing wouldn't last in an EU court anyway as it contradicts a lot of existing human rights law.

One problem the UK government has is that it is on a program of moving essential government services to the internet, so cutting whole house holds off the internet would deny public services to people. Worse still, innocent by standers and / or kids. The schools my kids go to extensively use the internet for homework, etc.

In the end, 3 strikes will fail, if it ever gets enacted. Like I say, all we have to do is suffer for a few years while it happens. Why do we have to go through this pain? Because certain industries that pour money in to party funds refuse to change. So, rather than prop them up with public money, government uses law. Quite vile, but there we go, we voted these people in, so its "our" fault.

(Edited typo)

noarchy• 14 years ago

I'd prefer a right to use the internet freely, rather than have a right to free internet. "Western" governments are rushing as we speak to catch up to the internet censorship of countries like China and Iran.

yobbobandana• 14 years ago

Is there any written statement by the UN about this?

Internet Access Is a Human Right, Says United Nations

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