So, the latest thing to be added to the human rights list is Internet access.
Hmm. My first reaction is “Just because something is awesome and/or totally tits does not mean society must bend over backwards to provide it to you”.
Real Human Rights, of course, are the absence of violence upon your person or property, be it economic or social. It means not having anyone or anything else, be it The State, big business, or some random guy in the street, coming up to you and enforcing a way of life, or unfair responsibilities on you. It does not mean using a God damn leviathan of The State to rob others of their lives in order to improve your own.
In other words, just because you want something, do not assume you have the right to use violence to get it.
In Japan, Mexico and Russia, nearly 75 per cent of respondents said they could not cope without their internet connection.
Hmm. Is this “I couldn’t cope” as in “I would die without Red Tube”, or “I couldn’t cope” as in “It would cause me a bit of inconvenience- I’d have to actually buy a porno mag!”? If the former, which is, er, unlikely to say the least, then you’ve got one messed up disease there. If the latter, (yes, it’s the latter) then you can just continue paying your monthly bill to your ISP. Simples.
“The right to communicate cannot be ignored,” Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), told BBC News.
Just as freedom of speech does not imply a right to be given a platform, freedom of communication does not imply a right to be given a mode to do so.
“The internet is the most powerful potential source of enlightenment ever created.”
He said that governments must “regard the internet as basic infrastructure – just like roads, waste and water”.
And, just like roads, waste, and water, stay the fuck away from the internet. It’s too important to let statist hands control. As demonstrated here:
However, many web users expressed concerns about the dangers of hacking, fraud and privacy. A majority of internet users in Japan, Germany, France, China and South Korea were not confident about expressing their opinions online.
But government regulation was not viewed as the correct method to solve these issues, with over half of the 27,000 respondents agreeing that that internet “should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere”.
Yes. Too important for the dead hand of the state.
“Despite worries about privacy and fraud, people around the world see access to the internet as their fundamental right,” said Doug Miller, the chairman of GlobeScan which conducted the survey. “They think the web is a force for good, and most don’t want governments to regulate it.”
You can’t have internet provided by government yet not regulated by it. It’s not possible. In the extreme case, putting the internet into “public” (read: State) ownership is paving the way for our own version of The Great Firewall of China. In the more likely case of having private/public mixtures, we can only end up with a corporatist mess of special interests and bureacratic waste.
If the internet is to remain a good thing for freedom, it needs to keep on a voluntary, free market basis.
Update: Speak of the devil!
