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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

And who is obligated to provide these resources? There is a big difference between the government not being able to restrict you in some way, and some party providing you with something (general purpose computing in this case). Presumably someone should have provided printing presses as well.

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You pay for drinking water, it's still a human right. You have the right to free speech, but aren't entitled to somebody else providing you with a platform. These things aren't incompatible.

This would be more about putting a limit on the degree to which this right can be impeded in the legal system and by regular laws which happens to be the main point of a constitution.

What right do you think is being violated, though? It’s not like anyone is arguing that you must use YouTube so I don’t see freedom of association or your control of what you do on your computer being impacted. I would support claims if, say, a public school required students to watch videos but that would be against the school for having picked an unsuitable vendor rather than YouTube.

Rights aren't necessarily added to the constitution because they're currently being violated. They're added to secure the rights into the future.

There are many developments that are moving in the direction of this being violated, the most recent of which is Web Environment Integrity[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity

I'm not sure if you're arguing a positive right to general purpose computing (where somebody has to provide you with) or a negative one (where somebody can't stop you from having). Could you please clarify?

I'm arguing a negative right: "This would be more about putting a limit on the degree to which this right can be impeded in the legal system and by regular laws which happens to be the main point of a constitution."

So what precisely are you asking for?

As I said, "The right to general purpose computing should be part of the constitution in any country that claims to value free speech."

Yes, but that’s not related in any way to using a private service without paying for it. You have that now and if YouTube shut down tomorrow you’d still have it.

I believe my comment is perfectly clear in the context of the comment I was responding to.

That’s probably why you aren’t getting much support: if you can’t specify what you’re saying in enough detail for anyone else to even know what you mean it’s going to be hard for us to talk about it.

At this point GP has made clear higher up in the thread. GP said they are arguing a negative right, which means that it's not something somebody has to provide to you, it's something they are prohibited from doing to you. For example, Freedom of Speech in the US Constitution is a negative right, meaning that the government cannot prevent you from your freedom of speech. It doesn't compel anyone to do anything to "give" you that right, it means that it can't be taken away from you.

What you are arguing against would be a positive right, in which case I would agree with you. And to be clear, there are others arguing for the positive version vs. the negative version[1], so it's very easy to get cross threaded on this topic, but is ultimately a very different philosophical thread

[1] For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899830

I’m fully aware, but they’re unclear about what specifically they believe should apply here. There’s no right to access someone else’s videos and the example they gave of drinking water doesn’t remotely fit this situation since that’s both a necessity and in most cases provided by a regulated utility rather than a normal business.

We typically think of these kind of rights in the context of governments or natural monopolies because you don’t have a choice about using those but that’s clearly not a valid position here. The closest I can come would perhaps be a government privacy regulation limiting the types of tracking which a company is allowed to perform or perhaps some requirement that things like DRM not be restricted to a single option, but they have specified anything in enough detail to know if that’s what they had in mind.

For hardware, the government could subsidize manufacturers for units sold in the country that meet requirements. Or provide a tax rebates to citizens who purchase them. Nobody is saying "A car in every driveway, and a server farm in every basement." Just ensuring a general purpose computer is affordable for families earning some fraction of the poverty line.

For software, The government could give grants to developers of FOSS operating systems and essential software, similar to how the US encourage the arts through the National Environment for the Arts. The grants would come with a requirement for distributing the works online to any citizen (e.g. download link on a public page). For people with crappy or no internet, the gov could mail USB sticks or CDs for cost plus shipping.

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