EU recognizes Internet access as a fundamental right, on par with freedom of expression | Hacker News Reader

EU recognizes Internet access as a fundamental right, on par with freedom of expression

news.zdnet.com

46 pointsandr40 comments

Positive rights are very different than negative rights. Right to free speech means no one can oppress your speech, essentially barring action, so it's called a negative right.

A right to a trial by jury is the only positive right in the US Bill of Rights. It's a huge pain in the ass to do jury duty, in part because law mandates we take action.

A positive right to health care coverage or internet access are ridiculous, because it is a mandate for someone to provide service to you.

Instead of people operating in good faith through mutually beneficial exchange, the government steps in and makes people do it. That kind of violence or theft is bad.

I'm all for greater access to the internet. Calling it a right is a bad idea.

There is also a middle ground: Instead of 'rights,' call internet access, health care or jury trials 'good.' Have governments pursue 'good.' They will argue about whether laissez faire is better at achieving this good then direct provision, but the groundwork is less idealistic & thus more likely to be rational.

If something is a 'right,' it makes it automatically take precedence over anything that is simply good (like faster internet access). This is a problem if you are deciding between connecting a small number of people or improving the service for a large number of people.

I don't think the distinction between positive & negative is useful for anything more then a rule of thumb. It's just that positive rights tend to cost less to grant. If we were comfortable with fewer absolutes, I would favour replacing rights with good, bad, better, worse. *For the sake of predictability & a workable battle cry, it may be useful to grant tentative rights. But I wouldn't call them rights. "The government has decided to grant everyone access by 20XX."

this is a naive viewpoint. government is not necessarily an 'other' which impinges on us; rather, it's an organization to which people can outsource the largest scale tasks, such as infrastructure or military defense. It would be nice if all commercial exchanges were mutually beneficial, but they're not.

this is a naive viewpoint. It would be nice if all govt activities were beneficial, but they're not.

Also, commercial enterprises can do very large scale tasks such as build dams, road systems, and the like. It's not much good at doing military defense, but for making stuff....

If I started a country, I'd keep defense lightweight by training people in small arms and getting a contract in place with Blackwater. Private warfighting and defense are already viable and popular.

Please describe some of the commercial exchanges you partake in that are not mutually beneficial.

The difference between government and an outsourcing organization is that the government will violently shut you in a room for a very long time if you decide not to participate in a mandate.

It is actually hard to tell from the article whether the EU parliament recognized Internet access as a fundamental right. The article itself did say that's what it did, but there was no actual quote from what the EU parliament passed that corroborated that they actually said this.

In any case, I think that holding Internet access to be a fundamental right is confusing means with ends. Freedom of expression is a fundamental right. One could argue that freedom to pursue education and better oneself is a fundamental right. Internet access is an implementation detail of ensuring these rights in the 21st century.

Fundamental rights are about principles; something like universal Internet access is about implementation.

I believe Estonia did this first, a few years ago. This only dilutes real rights, such as freedom of expression.

As both government and businesses put more of their interaction with citizens and customers online, having access to the Internet becomes a prerequisite to participate in society on equal ground with others.

I agree with you. It's very important for people to have internet access for the reason you mentioned, and also to have better access to more knowledge (Wikipedia!).

This is an important point. Sometimes we read about people here being banned from using the net (sometimes for things like soliciting minors, but also just because it's regarded as a 'luxury'.)

As well as being very hard to enforce, it's not unlike house arrest. Like others here, I have difficulty functioning without net access. And it's pretty much an economic essential if you want any kind of a decent job.

Why do you believe that ?

If you meant about Estonia, here is a link: http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0701/p07s01-woeu.html

(I had no idea that it's been almost six years already since I saw that!)

If you meant about the dilution of real rights, I'd have to get political to explain. I hope this is OK since the headline is already political.

It has to do with negative and positive rights. Very briefly, a positive right is a right to be given something through the action of someone else. A negative right is usually a right to be left alone in some way, such as a right to free expression. As a positive right, a right to internet access can only be guaranteed to everyone through a violation of someone's negative rights.

If I recall correctly, the EU's "right" to Internet Access was in response to France's "three strikes" cutoff law.

In other words, this is a right that prevents governments from cutting off an individual's access, not (and correct me if I'm wrong) any right to free state-paid Internet access.

I believe you are correct about the law, but I was responding more to the idea expressed in the title and in the article of recognizing internet access as a "fundamental" right "on par" with the right to free expression.

Be that as it may, one can easily imagine cases where the benefits of creating a positive right would outweigh the harm. Any particular reason to think negative rights must trump everything else?

A positive right infringes on the rights of others. For example, a right to health care means doctors and nurses don't have rights to their time; a right to housing means existing home owners don't have a right to their homes.

There are certainly positive rights that could be net beneficial. And taking away negative rights could also be helpful. E.g. the negative externalities of imminent domain could be reduced by censoring anyone who tried to talk about how it's a bad deal -- this would temporarily reduce the negative effect on real estate prices. But it sets bad precedents and leads to bad decisions.

"For example, a right to health care"

But we have a right to health care, at least where I live, and I'm not aware of doctors' rights being compromised. Nothing's forcing them to work for the National Health Service.

That sort of right merely compels the government to implement certain policies (i.e. hiring enough public sector doctors).

I was thinking more along the lines of anything tax pays for (so yes, healthcare does work as an example, but not in the way you suggest). Presumably, taxing people is a violation of their negative right to be left alone. Yet tax pays for many good things, and I don't want to live in a place where it doesn't exist.

> one can easily imagine cases where the benefits of creating a positive right would outweigh the harm.

Houw about three really good/strong examples?

I'll even stipulate one - trial by jury with competent representation. (I'm pretty sure that health care won't qualify.)

Yes, as I explained at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=602678 it has to do with equal rights.

I'm not sure that's necessary. Can you link on a resource that says positive rights always result in the violation of someone's negative rights? I guess the negative right of property would be violated by the tax cost of the internet.

The positive/negative rights thing is basically the libertarians adopting a simplified and less-nuanced reading of Isaiah Berlin's famous essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty"

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/twoconcepts.pd...

It's better to go to the originals on things like this then to read what they've become in the political folk mythology on the internets.

The only exception would be a positive right to something previously unowned. For example, you could have a right to own any island you discover, without violating someone else's preexisting claim.

But if you have a right to be fed, it violates someone else's right to the food they own; if you have a right to medical care, nurses and doctors don't own their own time, etc.

This point seems misguided. Your right to medical care doesn't force nurses and doctors to become nurses and doctors - on the contrary it enables their right to a job if that is their chosen career path.

But you don't mind being guaranteed a speedy trial by a jury of your peers, do you?

Even though that is something guaranteed by something called the 'Bill of Rights' it's really more of an implementation detail of the general mission of the government. A speedy trial just ensures that the government must treat like things the same and different things differently. Without the 'speedy' provision then an innocent person could conceivably be treated as a guilty one by delaying trial. Similarly, the right to an impartial jury ('a jury of one's peers' isn't in the Constitution) is a check on arbitrariness on the part of the courts. So the first principle is that we're innocent until proven guilty and that like things should be treated alike and different things should be treated differently.

Right, but the point is that the "right to a trial" (at all):

- is a positive right (to have a jury trial at all implies judge, jury, etc., all of whom have better things to do with their time than listen to two losers argue back and forth, and thus somehow someone is going to be compelled to provide for the trial, either directly -- jury duty -- or indirectly -- via taxation)

- that a positive right makes it into the bill of rights means positive rights as such are not verboten, or somehow anathema to the founders' sensibilities

- or it's an entitlement (which is closer to the truth), but then again there's no problem with entitlements being enshrined in the bill of rights

I've got a special place in my heart for people who use the positive/negative distinction as a kind of club; cf my other post in this thread to see the origin of the notion in modern discourse.

I do mind, actually. I did read your other post in this thread, and you've made some unwarranted assumptions.

What about it do you mind?

As I explained in another post, I'm against violating people's rights.

Wait what?

What makes freedom of expression a real right and not access to internet?

Who made you king of the universe?

If one can simply make up any rights someone feels like having, even when they contradict fundamental rights (see my earlier post), I don't think they can be considered "real".

If you believe in equal rights (i.e., nobody is king of the universe) then you can't support the infringing of some people's rights for the benefit of others.

Isn't taxation precisely that? I mean, if the government coming and taking some portion of your stuff isn't an infringement of your negative rights, what is?

Yet I'm all for tax, if it pays for necessary stuff.

Assuming you didn't agree to it, it sure is. But it's possible to want the necessary stuff without favoring a tax.

Much of the way I express myself is via the Internet. Take away my net access, and I don't have freedom of expression.

We're stabbing at the same liver mate. ;)

Well, at least as far as the USA is concerned, the founders enumerated the list of natural rights endowed on people by their creator. This was not arbitrary, it was based on thousands of years of western philosophy. What the original poster is worried about is the conflation of entitlements with rights.

erm, no. The USA Bill of Rights is a list of restrictions on government which attempts to explicitly protect some natural rights, _NOT_ an enumeration of all natural rights.

As long as the "right to internet access" is a specialization of the right to freely associate (preemptively ruling out three strike laws and whatnot), I don't see how it's impinging upon anyone's right to be left alone.

What you're describing is really the right to seek internet access, and I agree with your analysis of it. For anyone to proclaim the existence of a "right to internet access" is dangerously vague, however.

Unfortunately the EU Parliament has no legislative power. The Council of Ministers, which according to the article seems to contest that resolution is the final arbiter. However it seems quite a nice move and perhaps if it gets publicity and support the council of ministers might find their hands tightened.

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