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.
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.
Your choice of an example is rather poor, as you now are conflating issues of children's rights with something else. Saying children have a right to an education only means we have to pay for them, because they regularly can't pay for themselves through no fault of their own - this is a different issue than what the right entails.
For many many many examples of how your argument breaks down, look no further than the US constitution. We have the right to freedom of the press - yet no one demands they get a free press. The right to bear arms - yet no one demands the government give everyone guns to exercise that right. The right not be compelled to self-incriminate, yet no one demands free paper shredders or disk wiping utilities. The right to sue anyone for more than $25, but no one demands free lawyers (for this purpose criminal defense is a different -- no disingenuous replies on this please).
So yeah a positive right in this case would provide an obligation for someone, but it doesn't mean providers must give no-charge options, it means the government would be obliged to not deny citizens internet access (except possibly as a penalty for crimes, ala prison does for a lot of rights).
Essentially this is a longwinded way of me stating this is a combination of strawman and slippery slope fallacies piled on factually incorrect statements.
Another example is "the right to health care." People don't use that to mean that you have the right to pay thousands of dollars for an MRI. They generally mean the government should provide health care.
I don’t think so. With only freedom of speech, the government could still ban access to all foreign-country-hosted read-only sites – sites without commenting or other interactivity. That would include many informational sites and blogs.
In practice, no, because UN resolutions are only as good as their ability to enforce them, which in the case of general-assembly resolutions basically boils down to no ability, except attempting to shame people who flaunt them. Only a handful of UN organs (e.g. the Security Council and the International Criminal Court) have anything approaching teeth.
One of the problems of "freedom of speech" is that many people have bundled a lot of concepts into "speech". There are a great many Internet activities that would be difficult to capture as speech.
Reading a political screed, for instance, is not speech. It is probably protected in some other way, but I'm actually unaware of how. (Actually, considering workplace laws, I begin to suspect it's not protected.) Differently, is clicking a Like button considered speech? What about Unliking? How about transferring a file, or maintaining a personal wiki that no one else has access to?
These aren't questions I want answered anytime soon. I'd rather leave them alone and simply say that people should have the opportunity to engage in these activities, full stop, without having to figure out whether or not they're speech.
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.
I'm not sure that protection an individuals freedom to express themselves necessarily entails protection of the transport of encodings of that expression - I would rather see that latter protection made explicit.
What’s so bad about clarifying that that includes the internet?
I mean, there are politicians in democratic states who believe that protections afforded to the press on the basis of rights don’t apply to, for example bloggers. It’s not altogether obvious why freedom of expression or speech should automatically include the internet.
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.
The primary diplomatic function of the U.N. is laying down specific guidelines for international conduct, so that there's no more arguing about what constitutes a violation of a specific treaty.
For example, suppose Ukrageria says, "But Zimbraqistan stationed 14 battleships outside of our port, that's an act of war," and Zimbraqistan counters, "But we just want them to lift the 200% tariff on Zimbraqistanian goods." The U.N. has specifically said that free access to ports is a sovereign right, so that resolves this dispute and gives Ukrageria international support for a declaration of war against Zimbraqistan.
Similarly, some countries have criticized Egypt for disconnecting its citizens from the global internet. Egypt in turn counters that their citizens still can express their opinions and speak freely so it's not a human rights violation. The purpose of the U.N.'s resolution is to resolve this dispute and clarify that freedom of expression must include international communication over the internet.
Right, before they did it everybody thought "freedom of speech" meant only that you can use your actual voice freely. But now everybody knows you can also use Twitter! So what about using printed media? Radiowaves? Phone communications? Should we wait for UN to explain us about that too?
For anybody seriously considering the question it mus be obvios the question is not in the means of expression and freedom of speech was never meant to be restricted to exercising one's vocal cords.
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.
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.
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.
Specifically:
This marks a departure from the conclusions of the 2nd World Water Forum in The Hague in 2000, which stated that water was a commodity to be bought and sold, not a right.[102] There are calls from many NGOs and politicians to enshrine access to water as a binding human right, and not as a commodity.
It seems to imply pretty clearly that access to water as a human right contradicts requirement for payment. The same argument is frequently heard when the healthcare is discussed. So I would say implying that it means not only ability to access but actually ability to access for all, regardless of means - is not out of the question. At least it does not contradict how many other "rights" are interpreted.
> 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?
What if I can't pay for it? Do I have the right to force somebody else to pay for it? Am I going to be forced to pay for the Internet of somebody else? Why is the Internet a human right but electricity, which is kind of critical to running the Internet, is not?
Most better-off countries treat electricity as something that if not a right, is at least a strong public-policy priority: something that we believe everyone should have access to. At least, to the extent that the country as a whole is developed enough for it to be feasible. And yes, that includes subsidizing it to improve access; rural electrification in the United States and Canada (at least) was massively subsidized.
But public policy priorities are very different than rights. A public policy priority can be modified or eliminated as circumstances dictate. In theory, anyway, a human right is absolute.
That's why people who campaign for positive rights make a grave error, IMO. It cheapens the entire concept.
> What if I can't pay for it? Do I have the right to force somebody else to pay for it? Am I going to be forced to pay for the Internet of somebody else?
That's roughly what taxes are for, yes.
> Why is the Internet a human right but electricity, which is kind of critical to running the Internet, is not?
There are a number of arguments for electricity being a human right. I'm perfectly okay with saying it is one.
That said, the interesting point is that you're imagining electricity here to be an implicit right of Internet access. That's fine, but it implies that, if Internet access did not require electricity (and who knows, maybe it won't someday), the claim is that Internet access remains a human right without a need to imply a right to electricity.
I don't understand this logic. Maybe it's cultural. But still, freedom of speech is something like a human right, right? Then does it mean the government need to give newspapers for free to those who won't buy them?
Freedom to access internet is to same level, it means human people shouldn't be arbitrarily blocked from accessing internet, that's all, that's enough, and that's already a lot, actually.
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.
I studied law in germany for a couple of semesters and I learned that human rights are never absolute. They are more like bubbles. Basically your right ends where it collides with someones else right or to paraphrase it "one man's freedom is another man's limitation".
The purpose of the law is to make sure, that those bubbles are about equally sized for everyone.
0 would be equal size for everyone, so I would hope the purpose of the law is more than that. I wouldn't also take Germany as particularly good example because, for example, free speech is not a right in Germany (they may claim they have very good reason for that, but don't they always do so?).
Rights are "not absolute" only is the sense that exercising your right does not absolve you from responsibility for violating other people's rights. So, if you exercise your right to freely use your property, say, a gun, and shoot somebody - you'll go to jail. But not for using your gun - but rather for violating other's right to live unshot by your gun. Your right to use your property didn't go anywhere, but it also didn't remove your responsibility for the consequences of such use. If there's no consequences, there's no place for government to intervene (I know most governments disagree, of course they do).
You completely skipped over: your right ends where it collides with someones else right
This seems to be the most natural definition of rights. I can say whatever unless doing so prevents you from also speaking. Thus, I can't use even larger speakers to drown out what a protesters outside my factory are saying. But, I could use them to convey my message.
Where did you get the idea that "free speech is not a right in Germany"? Free speech _is_ a right[1]. But, following the principle outlined by Riesling it is not an absolute right.
In Germany, speech that is deemed to "incite hatred" is illegal, for example. Also, denying or approving certain things publicly is illegal, even if this deed leads to no harm to anybody.
That means no freedom of speech. Freedom of speech includes freedom of saying false, hateful, disturbing and insulting things too. "Not absolute right" means not freedom but government-approved limits. That's exactly what my point was - when you move from protecting rights to banning stuff that does not violate anybody's rights but is unpleasant for people to witness and so banning it is popular - you have a problem with freedom.
Don't feel too bad for Germany though - most countries have problems with freedom of speech. It's a hard concept to maintain, since it is unpopular and disturbing speech that needs protecting - nobody objects to popular or neutral speech.
Via the social contract, by infringing on the rights of another, one volunteers to temporarily suspend the right to freedom. A right cannot be taken away or lost as they are inherent to the human condition.
Actually, a problem with Social Contract theory is that it can't deal with free-riders. If you never agreed to the contract then you can't be obligated to its terms. So you can infringe on the rights of people who did ascent to the terms of the contract without being obligated to submit to any punishment.
First, a rights violation does not indicate the non-existence of a right.
Second, "freedom" is not a right and never has been. It is not a useful term on its own. You can be free to do something, or free from something, but you can't just be generically free.
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.
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).
> 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.
I don't know why you got voted down because you are correct.
The English common law right of free speech exists to this day and has (largely) not been supplanted. It exists in many countries that use English common law as a base.
Enshrining it in a constitution was new, perhaps, but then the idea of a constitution was new. The UK still doesn't have a constitution.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> The depressing but true fact is that the U.S. wields more military power than the rest of the world combined.
Um. This isn't true according to an Economist article I'm having trouble finding. Switching over to Wikipedia, China has the largest active military by a good 8.3 million troops; you'd have to find some explanation that can convincingly say that America has more power by another measure.
Military size is only a small factor when comparing world super powers. Going by that Wikipedia list, North Korea's military isn't too far from the US military. But we all know how that war would go.
>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.
You must be kidding! Do you not know about the dozens of civilian leaders elected by majority of the citizens which the US assassinated or kidnapped to install a puppet client dictator?
You mean when we had to destroy the villages in order to save them?
Here is a tiny snapshot from the list of coups by US against popular elected leaders of the world:
https://www.google.com/search?q=1953+iran+coup+cia+mi6 (a brutal puppet dictator King Raza Shah Pehlvi was installed in 1953, the Iranians overthrew the tyrant in 1979 and they have been under sanctions since then, Saddam was given weapons in 1980s to kill the Iranians, i.e. before Iraq was the target of sanctions in 1990s)
Remember when Vietnam was denied the right to democracy and instead 4 million Vietnamese bombed and killed, to solve their "security dilemma?"
1954 Dwight Eisenhower: "80% of the population in Vietnam would have voted for the Communist "Ho Chi Minh" over the Emperor Bảo Đại"
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1084/
"Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.
--60 Minutes (5/12/96)"
Just imagine someone saying, "3000 American civilians died on 9/11/01 but the cost was worth it." When it's half a million brown / non-European white kids the cost was definitely worth it.
