Or, rather, I'd frame it as part of the human right to freely express and communicate, at best … and that in terms of not being restricted from doing so, while not necessarily entitled to enablement of it. I.e., the government has no right to censor my Tweets, but I don't have a right to someone giving me a computer with Twitter and an Internet connection (just as freedom of the press doesn't mean I have a right to own a newspaper).
That said, internet access is something very valuable, and a society benefits, IMO, from broad, even universal availability and provision. I'd say there are more fundamental Maslovian imperatives that we should be obliged, as a society, to provide … but one could make a very powerful policy argument that maximizing Internet access is a good thing to do. #ddtb
Reshared post from +donald mclaughlin
Very interesting discussion on what we can and should value in humanity from one of the principal contributors to our evolving, electronic existence.
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Google VP: Internet Access Not a Human Right
Internet access, while an enabler of basic human rights, is not itself a human right, says Google Vice President Vinton Cerf.
“There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right,” Cerf says in an opinion piece in Thursday’s New York Times. But Internet access, apparently, does not meet that threshold.
Cerf calls it a “mistake” to include any piece of technology as a human right, because “over time we will come to come to value the wrong things.” He also argues that the exclusive…
I would consider it to be a right in that, if you have access, that access should not be denied without an extremely compelling reason.