Legal Commentary

Internet Access, Human Rights (and Search Engines)

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

Cory Doctorow suggests that internet access will soon be considered a human right,

Homeless people and the Internet - Boing Boing: Here’s a prediction: in five years, a UN convention will enshrine network access as a human right (preemptive strike against naysayers: “Human rights” aren’t only water, food and shelter, they include such “nonessentials” as free speech, education, and privacy). In ten years, we won’t understand how anyone thought it wasn’t a human right.

Personally, I think it won’t happen nearly that soon — we still need clean water world-wide, but it would be nice to imagine a world where we think we can’t afford not make internet access a basic right.

I’m pretty sure Bruce Sterling imagined something like this in ‘Islands in the Net’; I know that so many science fiction authors have characters from rich places describing their idea of abject poverty as being unable to afford ‘net access for it be hovering between cliche and trope. Although in my imagined future, basic access to the cloud in rich places will be free; in nice places it will be plain free, in less-nice places you’ll get ads in your head.

Incidentally, I had a fifteen-minute mental blackout about the author/title for ‘Islands in the Net’ — although I could remember the story. (Norman Spinrad? Nope. Stirling Robinson? Nope.) This is the one sort of search I make from time to time where Google is basically useless: I know the plot of a short story, or a book, but can’t recall the title, the name of the main character, or the author. Amazon doesn’t help either.

I could bleg about it when it happens, but that’s not usually my style. (Oh heck: anyone recall the old pulpy short story about the guy who invents a ray gun you can make in your basement from common parts that can cut the world like a tomato, prevents the government from suppressing it, and justifies it by saying that now we’ll have to be nice to each other? Who wrote that? What was it called? Paging the Nielsen Haydens.)

I’m like that with case names sometimes too, but legal facts tend to be sufficiently stylized that I can usually find them, or references to them, on Westlaw pretty quickly.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on May 31, 2009 (boomark / email).