In a message written on Thu, Jan 05, 2012 at 11:09:59AM -0500, Jay Ashworth wrote:
Broadband, to me, is not a human right. It is something that makes our society more efficient, and improves the quality of life for virtually every citizen, so I do think the government has a role and interest in seeing widespread, if not universal broadband deployment. Failure to provide broadband to someone is not a human rights violation though, and the idea that it is probably is offensive to those who have experienced real human rights violations.
Didn't *say* broadband. Didn't even say "Internet service". Said "Internet *access*", in the non-techspeak meaning of those words.
For the purposes of my e-mail and this point in time, they are all synonymous. That is, if "interenet access" is a right, providing someone a 9600bps dial up does not, in my mind, qualify. That might qualify for e-mail access, but you can not use a reasonable fraction of the Internet at that access speed. Similarly, denying someone internet service denies them internet access. The only difference between your terms and mine, is that mine are fixed to this point in time while yours is a general concept that may move in the future. One day 50Mbps broadband may not qualify anymore as "internet access" due to where the interernet ends up. But let's take a specific (famous) example. Kevin Mitnick. From his wikipedia page: "During his supervised release, which ended on January 21, 2003, he was initially forbidden to use any communications technology other than a landline telephone." If Internet access (to use your term) had been a human right than his human rights were violated by the government when they banned him from using any communications technology. Do we really want to suggest that banning him from using the computer is the same level of violation as enslaving him, torturing him, or even killing him? -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/