An outcry inevitably follows when the internet is blocked or threatened – and the argument that access is a human right is rarely far behind.
Recent examples include , which switched off the net apparently to thwart exam leaks; the to combat terrorist use of online communications in the UK; and in regions hit by protest.
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The lofty assignation of human rights to the internet arrived with remarkable speed. In 2003, some 14 years after the World Wide Web was proposed, a United Nations summit .
often show popular support for this idea – at around 80 per cent. It is generally presumed that the failure of nations to provide unfettered access is a sign of political repression or economic underdevelopment, or both.
But does it really deserve to be called a human right? No. I take that view because in practice this so-called right is a lot more about freedom from censorship than freedom from payment.
It is much more like the kind of “civil rights” that prevailed before the UN’s formal recognition of “universal human rights” in 1948. That was a time when such civil rights were often
In such cases, people who claim a particular right typically already possess the capacities needed to make the most of it. With internet access, they are usually willing and able to pay for it, but object to the government stopping them from acquiring access or, in the case of censorship, partially restricting it.
How universal?
In our supposedly “post-socialist” world, it is far from clear that the institutional mechanisms are in place to create universal internet access – that is, access regardless of ability to pay. Which means this is a right that is at present no more than a high-grade facilitator for those who are already empowered in other ways.
Moreover, even though half the world’s population now has some sort of online access, the internet has had a chequered record of improving the human condition – surely the aim of any human right. It has certainly increased the capacity for self-expression, as the original UN summit stressed. But the overall results so far have been more disruptive than constructive.
The historic benchmark was the failure of the social media-driven “Arab Spring” that began in 2010, which the journalist Evgeny Morozov memorably dubbed a “net delusion” – critiquing the assumption that the internet is by default a liberating force rather than one that can repress.
What is clear about the extension of internet access is its amplification of people’s ability to do what they already have done or would like to do, probably in an unprecedented way. People spend more, complain more – and perhaps even create more.
But the track record of the impact of this extended access has yet to justify the sort of species-wide improvement that makes it worthy of being a human right.
This is not to say that internet access is a bad thing per se – it’s not – just that it does not qualify for the exceptional status increasingly assigned to it.
