Vint Cerf: Internet Access Is Not a Human Right
I began this piece raring to disagree, but I find it hard to fault his logic. A human right to unimpeded use of carriages would seem hilarious today, and a right to the use of landline phones will likely become so in the next decade.We don't want to regulate specific rights as reactions to the particular issues of the day, we want to distill those issues to their essence so that we can meaningfully protect freedoms that are fundamental to meaningful human existence.However, as others have noted here, this article leaves a couple of important points unaddressed.Firstly, how can we be sure that the internet isn't fundamental? I can imagine arguing (in an earlier time) that legal counsel shouldn't be a human right, because we'll have something better than the legal system at some point. Yet thousands of years of human development have led only to a more complex legal system with the same fundamental ideas. Maybe the internet isn't horse-riding, maybe it's the invention of law. How do we know?Secondly, if internet access isn't fundamental, then what is its more essential formulation? Being banned from the internet today makes you deaf, dumb and blind; much like being banned from electricity would cripple you. The difference is, nobody's trying to make three strikes laws for the power grid. We need to protect something. So what is it? The idea of free access to information? Ability to form and join networks? It's clearly not anything that's currently protected.Unfortunately, there is more than just an academic interest at stake here. It's well and good to say "ha ha, you see, I have a new and interesting perspective", but this is a situation where there are actual losses being made in terms of real people's access to the internet. Unless Vint Cerf is trying to say that's not important, perhaps it's a little counterproductive to make an article that shoots down a core idea for internet freedom without providing anything else of substance to fill its place.