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Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

> I don't agree that high speed is a "human right"

What makes access to high-speed internet a privilege as opposed to a right? Why shouldn't everyone be guaranteed access to high-speed internet?

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You don't need internet to live, you don't need internet to earn a living, the internet does not cure cancer, the internet does not treat any disease. Yes the internet will grant you access to knowledge you wouldn't otherwise have, yes it will allow you to telecommute, yes it will allow you to type to strangers in 17 countries at once.

The internet however also:

- allows for persistent, extended bullying

- can lead to all sorts of negative mental health events by exposing you to all sorts of highly-curated content giving the perception that someone always has it better than you or by exposing you to incredibly graphic imagery and news

- encourages sedentary beahvior such as wathcing 12 hours of tv on a Saturday, sitting on HN/reddit for 3-5 hours a day, playing MMORPGs for 5, 10, 24 hours in a day.

It's no more a human right than diet coke or owning a vehicle is. It's a tool.

One could easily argue the internet, and recreational computation in general, is a detriment to society. A few years ago I did a little research and some maths and was quite surprised with how much time we collectively waste on just video games

>I got to thinking, 'how much time do we waste annually on video games' and I quickly found answers. The average U.S. gamer age 13 or older spent 6.3 hours a week playing video games during 2013. Wow, but what about globally? Could I find an estimate? Well, I did, on TED no less. We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames.

[1] Additional sources referenced on the page https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2016/8/2/humanitys-...

> It's no more a human right than diet coke or owning a vehicle is. It's a tool.

Access to essential tools (judicial system, healthcare, shelter, nourishment, etc.) is a human right, broadly speaking. The internet is quickly becoming an essential tool for carrying out nontrivial activities in our modern society.

> the internet will grant you access to knowledge you wouldn't otherwise have

Then I am forced to conclude that you also believe that education is not a human right on the same grounds.

> What makes access to high-speed internet a privilege as opposed to a right?

What makes it a privilege is that it's a consumer service, like cable television or satellite radio. Sure it's good to have, but hardly on the same page as "human rights".

There seems to be a trivializing of human rights by the left, who have a tendency to throw everything under the sun in as a human right so they can justify expanding the government to provide said right.

Access to the court system and a fair trial? Human Right Freedom from slavery? Human Right Broadband internet to watch streaming videos? Not a Human Right.

Your argument starts with a false premise, which is that because the providers code the delivery of high-speed internet as a "consumer service" that it is thus not a right.

By your same logic, if I began charging people to have access to the court system and a fair trial (which is arguably the case in the US today anyway) and treat the judicial system as a "consumer service," then it would cease to be a right.

That is hardly an argument, I'm sorry to say.

By definition human rights are intrinsic and universal. Everyone has them and everyone is responsible for not violating others'. Right off the bat we can see that claiming high-speed internet as a human right is asinine, because high-speed internet didn't even exist a couple of decades ago, thus access to it can't be claimed as an intrinsic right of the human soul.

It also fails universality. If even one person lacks broadband internet, then we would all be obligated to provide it or we are failing to uphold their rights. So if a person in Montana doesn't have broadband, everyone in e.g. Uganda and Malaysia is complicit in a human rights violation. It really is this silly, because human rights are not limited to any government or institution. They are a universal responsibility and mutual obligation between individuals as well, so defining them positively implies absurd moral conclusions.

Venturing into meta-level ideological territory, I can't help but perceive the theory of positive rights as a cynical tool for expanding government powers. It mandates utopian promises, it sucks the air away from reality-based alternatives that look anemic or even cruel by comparison, it requires nuance to argue against, and it functionally cements the government as the source and provider of human rights. It could not be better propaganda for the state.

Positive rights are a tool for expanding government services. This hardly grants power to the government except when citizens become dependent on it. Which is the case a priori, since the government acts as protector for the citizenry. So the relationship between government and citizen becomes at least no more exploitative than it was when introducing the service of positive rights.

No, it goes deeper than providing services. If the goal is only to provide services then that can simply be done for the sake of it. We can run welfare programs because it makes society run better or even just because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy.

But when we elevate those services to the status of faux "human rights" then it weakens actual rights. If your right to association is on the same playing field as my "right" to public housing, then disbanding right-leaning political parties is on the table because they threaten my human rights.

This may seem like an absurd example but we already have absurd arguments like the "right" to feel safe outweighs the right to bear arms, or the "right" to not hear hate speech outweighs the right to free expression. Balancing positive "rights" that must be supplied by the government against actual freedom-from-coercion negative rights is a monumental expansion of state power. Enshrining positive rights, as desirable as the ends are in themselves, is a serious and fundamental distortion to the ideological foundations of liberalism.

I fundamentally don't agree with an ever expanding list of "human rights", because it requires an every expanding government to fulfill them.

That’s not very nuanced.

A big Finnish government is different than, say, a big Russian government.

To me it seems like saying: I fundamentally disagree with dining out because it requires restaurant, and restaurant is always bad.

Restaurants didn't kill 100 million people over the previous century.

^This. Over the course of the 20th century, the vast majority of killings occurred at the hands of governments. Furthermore, it was typically governments killing their own people, not the people of other countries.

Say what will about big greedy corporations, they're boy scouts when compared to the carnage brought about by governments in the last century.

Whenever there was profit in the killing, corporations willfully helped. The distinction is meaningless.

You're probably correct. Corporations almost never reach an enormous scale without government to provide the regulatory moats necessary to inhibit competition and disruption. And that doesn't even take the issue of subsidies into account. Smaller government would likely lead to more small enterprises and fewer enormous ones.

Again this is not so clearly cut. With small govt, corporations take over its responsibilities, both social and repressive. There is plenty of historical precedent for that and AFAIK it is not considered a good thing.

I honestly think there’s a higher chance of Comcast killing 100 million people over the next century than “broadband for everyone”

And governments can change over time. I agree that there should always be room for nuance. But people should think carefully about what declaring something a human right really entails, and what kind of authority that gives the government regarding it. Most of our legislature talk about technology like they still login to the web with AOL.

Maybe in time we'll decide this one should be, but Sanders seems ready to expand that list a great deal.

Advanced technology infrastructure can't be sustained without extensive network of enforced relationships between humans. It's either government oversight or private monopoly, there's no third option.

Government exists solely to provide wellbeing to the citizens of a sovereignty. If a sovereignty has zero citizens, a government has zero utility.

People forcing governments to take care of them is really the only rational thing for governed people to do.

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