[148190] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Whacky Weekend: Is Internet Access a Human Right?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Zaid Ali)
Thu Jan 5 11:38:05 2012
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2012 08:37:07 -0800
From: Zaid Ali <zaid@zaidali.com>
To: Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com>,
NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <22737847.3289.1325779676786.JavaMail.root@benjamin.baylink.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 1/5/12 8:07 AM, "Jay Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Zaid Ali" <zaid@zaidali.com>
>
>> On 1/5/12 7:22 AM, "Jay Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
>>
>> >Vint Cerf says no: http://j.mp/wwL9Ip
>> >
>> >But I wonder to what degree that's dependent on how much our
>>governments
>> >make Internet access the most practical/only practical way to interact
>> >with them.
>> >
>> >Understand: I'm not saying that FiOS should be a human right. But as a
>> >society, America's recognized for decades that you gotta have a
>>telephone,
>> >and subsidized local/lifeline service to that extent; that sort of
>>subsidy
>> >applies to cellular phones now as well.
>
>> I agree with Vint here. Basic human rights are access to food, clothing
>> and shelter. I think we are still struggling in the world with that.
>>With
>> your logic one would expect the radio and TV to be a basic human right
>>but
>> they are not, they are and will remain powerful medium which be enablers
>> of something else and the Internet would fit there.
>
>Well, I dunno... as I think was obvious from my other comments: TV and
>Radio
>are *broadcast* media; telephones and the internet are not; they're
>*two-way*
>communications media... and they're the communications media which have
>been
>chosen by the organs of government we've constituted to run things for us.
>
>You hit the important word, though, in your reply: "*access to* food,
>clothing,
>and shelter"... not the things themselves.
>
>The question here is "is *access to* the Internet a human right,
>something
>which the government ought to recognize and protect"? I sort of think it
>is,
>myself... and I think that Vint is missing the point: *all* of the things
>we generally view as human rights are enablers to other things, and we
>generally dub them *as those things*, by synecdoche... at least in my
>experience.
If I wrote a blog article that criticized the government and it was
shutdown along with my Internet access I wouldn't say that my right to the
Internet was violated. I would say that my right to free speech was
violated. Regardless of one way or two way communication it is
communication.
Zaid
