At What Point Is Internet Access Considered A Fundamental Right?

At what point does the Internet cease to be a luxury subscription service, and become a utility, and over and above that – when does Internet access become a fundamental right like Freedoms of Speech and Assembly? The question is way overdue.

People’s modes of communication have been changing since the written language was invented 5,000 years ago. As our communication patterns change, the way we exercise our liberty changes as well. Keeping the liberty intact while the modus of exercising it changes wildly is something of a challenge for society.

Our current freedoms and liberties were generally crafted during the Age of Enlightenment, roughly given as the years 1715-1789. The printing press existed (1453), as did newspapers (1556). The radio did not (Galvani, 1791, at earliest; generally credited to Maxwell in 1864). Telecommunications did not exist at all; information was physically handed over or spoken. The best shot at long-distance communication used chained visual-range communications stations, in the form of fires, torch patterns, or shape patterns, and was usually reserved for governmental messaging.

Let’s examine how the Enlightenment-era liberties are being exercised today:

Freedom of Speech: It’s a rare day we’re trying to convince somebody of a new viewpoint by standing on a soapbox in the public square. If anything, it’s an anachronism today. We’re using all net channels at our disposal from Instagram via Reddit to Kik.

Freedom of the Press: Journalism has gone back to being an activity from having been a profession for the better part of two centuries. Our ability to observe and share the world around us has never been greater, and we share our small part of the world with the entire world at once and in real time.

Freedom of Information: We used to go to the library to look for information (and librarians have always held privacy in very high regard when it comes to protecting who looks for what). Today, Google.

Freedom of Assembly: We don’t gather in halls and squares to discuss civic society anymore. We gather in groups and channels of Slack, Skype, IRC, and Facebook to discuss the world we live in.

The list goes on.

Today, we exercise our fundamental liberties – freedoms of speech, assembly, opinion, thought, press, and information – through the Internet. Thus, it is not hard to argue that access to the Internet has become just as fundamental a right, as the other liberties we exercise through it.

It is therefore frustrating, not to say infuriating, to see offline-born legacy industries patronizingly treating the Internet as though it was a toy you can take away from misbehaving children.

The copyright industry, for one, has long argued they should have a right to shut people off the net (the so-called “three strikes”) on mere accusations of violating somebody’s exclusive distribution rights to creative works, and in doing so, shutting off entire households (the subscribing connection). Would you consider it proportionate to remove the freedoms of assembly, press, and speech for a whole household based on mere accusations from an automated robot in a legacy industry? Would you consider it reasonable to prevent a family from working, communicating, studying, and paying their bills? Me neither.

The European Parliament made this (“three strikes”) illegal in 2009 only thanks to hard work where new Europe-level laws mandated that any such disconnection must be preceded by a full trial with due process, thereby scuttling the copyright industry’s goal of having automated bots shutting off hundreds of thousands of people at no effort or cost to the industry. In the United States and Australia, the copyright industry is still trying to achieve such a right.

Even if that’s not a new observation, there is a definite disconnect between the net generation and the offline-borns. The net generation don’t speak of “doing something online”, they speak of “doing something period”. A small anecdote here: when I was running a large organization in Sweden, its northernmost subgroup gathered for a physical meeting in a remote cabin. They didn’t have running water, electricity, or mobile phone coverage in the cabin. But they did set up wi-fi for the meeting the first thing they did, using odd-frequency relays and car batteries. This tells something of priorities for the net generation, something that offline-born people don’t seem to grasp.

It is high time we get it settled at the high level that being able to access the internet is a fundamental right.

That doesn’t mean somebody else must pay for your connection, but it does mean you can’t be prohibited from paying for such a connection or using a free one.