Is Connectivity A Human Right?
facebook.com
facebook.com
Now, if Facebook is willing to pay the cost of providing every single human being with an Internet connection, they should be allowed to. But if they are implicitly suggesting every state in the world should make it easier for them to increase their user base by making it a top priority to provide everyone with Internet access (because "connectivity is a human right", right?), then someone ought to wake them up from their daydreaming.
Those are meta-rights that have been appended on; those are privileges that make sense in contemporary, first-world culture. The access to knowledge is the prime candidate for being added to that list, if anything else should be added at all. I don't see why this isn't an important discussion.
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By "a job", I did not mean "working for some company". Rather, I meant the opportunity to do something society considers valuable, and be rewarded in return.
The implication of this statement being that we have a right to survive, and only a right to survive.
More precisely, I would say we have a right to survive and to an opportunity to achieve more. But we have no intrinsic right to have a computer and an Internet connection handed down to us.
Does anyone have the right to deny a person connectivity?
Or more generally:
Does anyone have the right to deny a person access to knowledge?
And I continue by thinking about the question:
Does a government have the right to limit anyone's freedom without a fair and open judicial process?
Right to religious freedom/political beliefs etc then the police who defend you if attacked because of you're beliefs are then also slaves.
This is why many people object to so-called positive rights. Positive rights oblige others to action. Negative rights oblige inaction.
Applied to modern times, the police first have an obligation to not attack you for your beliefs. That doesn't make them your slaves. After that, they'll defend your beliefs if there's a law forcing them to (which is a positive law).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6248089
Given what you know, you may recuse yourself. Others are not afforded that decision. Even at a cost.
(see what I just did there?)
They are planning to work on data compression. Then, internet would be more affordable for people who already have internet connectivity. So, their work will essentially depend on the current and existing way internet connectivity is spreading to the 2/3rds that don't have internet connectivity now. But, are spinning it off as a moral / humanitarian ambition.
Besides, even if they come up with the next revolutionary data compression technique, I would be very surprised if it would be made available as an open standard to the internet to help make internet cheaper/affordable to everyone. I am sure their IP lawyers will have a part to play then.
Considering the fat in typical systems, I think their goal of 10x compression can be met with only public-domain techniques.
The fight is simply about freedom. I don't think it's logical or moral for anyone to be able to restrict another human being in anyway. Justice would of course be the only exception -- and justice is the grayest shade I know, so enter debate. I think we live in a completely backwards world thinking anything needs to be granted as a right first, rather than things starting as innate parts of freedom.
We've overcome the fight for physical survival. Now we are faced with fighting off the chains of our peers. That is in no way insulting to those still fighting for survival.
That being said, I think you are only hurting your own reputation by getting mad that other people are fighting for a different, less primitive or dire, cause. We want people to be fighting for all of the great causes in the world, don't criticize them for not fighting the one most important to you, commend them for their effort to bring more good into the world.
> Providing aid is good and should indeed be welcome. Enshrining connectivity as a "human right" is what I take issue with.
In other words, I am not getting mad at anyone for trying to make the word a better place. What I do find annoying (to say the least) is the conflation of something that is good (Internet access) with something that is essential for human life (food, shelter and anything worthy of being called a "human right"). Fast transportation makes the world a better place, yet no reasonable person would argue cars or airplane tickets are a human right.
If systematically allowing people to die is a wrong, then everyone is guilty of an original sin, given that to date no one has found a way to prevent death.
For example, 'the right to free speech': The government could use its vast power, military, authority to muzzle you, but it promises not to.
'the right to a trial by jury': The government could use its array of police forces to lock you up with no recourse, but it promises not to, without some level of due process.
They are not synonymous - a government certainly has the POWER to levy war, but that is generally not considered a 'right'.
Because some of these negative rights seem to be positive (like the right to a trial jury, although in earlier times, jury duty was not mandatory - or the right to vote, which is better thought of as the government promising not have governors that are unelected) - in recent times, they have been conflated with other things that have been labelled 'rights' like 'the right to water' or 'the right to the internet', or 'the right to a living wage', which are certainly categorically different from the negative rights, unless the promise is much more limited than what most of these additional rights advocates are lobbying for.
Can connectivity give people things that should be human rights?
I'd say probably not a efficient use of resources, but perhaps.
If this is the best Facebook has to offer I'll take it.