[kictanet] Internet Access Is Not a Human Right By VINTON G. CERF

Tue Jan 17 08:57:14 EAT 2012

Here is APC's response to the same:
http://www.apc.org/en/news/access-internet-and-human-rights-thanks-vint

By J Liddicoat for APC

WELLINGTON, New Zealand, 16 January 2012

13 January 2012

Dear Vint,

Thanks for the best possible start to 2012 for internet rights advocates.
Your New York Times column Internet Access is Not a Human
Right<http://nyti.ms/AurHTE>sparked a lively debate about the
internet, access and human rights. In 2012 we will need this debate more
than ever before. While we will vigorously debate some of your points, your
call to action for the technical community to take responsibility for human
rights is incredibly timely.

Much of the discussion following your column has been about definitions:
what is a human right? What is a civil right? What is the internet? What is
meant by access? No doubt there has even been some conceptual discussion
about “what is a horse” :).

Conversation on various lists turned to the advantages and disadvantages of
access to the internet as a human right, the implications (did this
mean internet
access should be free?), limits on rights and freedoms, and positive and
negative rights. Discussions ranged across the centuries from Confucius to
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and across a wide range of rights
like freedom of expression, privacy, right to information, access to
knowledge, and freedom from discrimination.

Cross-regional discussion also followed: What do each of these rights and
concepts mean in different countries and regions? Are these rights
meaningful if they are not achieved in practice? Is access to the internet
more important than access to water or food or medicine or freedom from
torture?<http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2012/01/12/netizen-report-celebration/>And
if not, can it be a human right? Some ranged into how human rights
relate to governments and the implications for multi-stakeholder processes.

Perhaps the discussions reveal more of what we do not know about human
rights and their application to the internet. In this regard, I was
delighted to see that both you and Frank La Rue, the United Nations Special
Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, agree that access to the internet is
not a human right, but an enabler of access to human rights (although your
article seemed to imply the Special Rapporteur said the opposite). Instead,
the Special Rapporteur was clear that in relation to the internet our human
rights apply, including our freedom of expression, privacy and freedom of
association. He also said that governments have an obligation to facilitate
access to the internet and that such access has two aspects: access to
infrastructure and access to content. While your column focussed on the
former, the current debates in the United States of America for the Stop
Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act tell us that
access to content on the internet is now a global issue.

So far many have shared your view that access to the internet is not a
human right, and agree that access to the internet facilitates a wide range
of human rights, including civil and political rights and freedoms. But
many have also qualified this, noting that as more and more governments
(and corporations) require citizens to be online for basic civic
transactions (enrolling in schools, accessing government information,
banking, filing tax returns, compiling health information, and so on)
interference with or denial of access becomes a human rights issue.

At the Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi last year, APC held a pre-event
on access to the internet. The conclusions of this event showed clearly
that access to the internet is a multi-faceted concept including human
rights, access to content, access to infrastructure, regulatory policies,
privacy, security and more. In relation to ‘universal provision’ we
concluded that the best way to ensure universal, affordable access was to
take a human rights approach <http://bit.ly/u0LZ5v> to
multi-stakeholder internet
governance.

You’ve helped to kick start 2012 with a healthy debate, the quality and
depth of which is moving beyond a simple “yes” “no” polemic, to a richer,
more nuanced and deeper discussion. While some of this will be very
familiar to those who shaped the WSIS and developed the APC Internet Rights
Charter and similar documents one thing is clear: The conversation about
human rights and the internet is growing and the voices and views are
getting more diverse.

This will be critically important in 2012 for many reasons including the
upcoming Human Rights Council Panel on freedom of expression and the
internet, the proposed one day United Nations discussion on “enhanced
cooperation” in relation to critical internet resources, and the
consideration of internet related human rights issues in the Universal
Periodic Reviews of Ecuador, India, Brazil, South Africa, and the
Philippines, to name a few.

As to the distinction between civil rights and human rights: international
law is clear that civil rights are a subset of human rights under the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and related instruments. But this
distinction is probably about as interesting to lay people as the
distinction between TCP and IP – experts know what these mean, but to a lay
person, all are just part of the overall system of shared protocols.

And this notion of shared protocols is why your call for engineers and the
technical community to take seriously their responsibility for human rights
should be strongly supported. In fact, we owe the current openness of the
internet to those in the technical community, including you, who hard-baked
human rights into internet protocols and other core internet architecture.
Thank you. We trust that that we will be able to rely on this community to
stand by their history as we face new challenges to the openness of the
internet, such as that posed by SOPA and PIPA mentioned above.

We have called for the technical and engineering community to talk more
with human rights advocates precisely for some of the reasons you
mention<http://bit.ly/pi1Ttq>.
And there is lots to talk about including WHOIS policy, IPv6, new
technologies and privacy, and much more. But is there shared understanding
between the technical community and human rights advocates about human
rights, about how these relate to technical issues, or about the current
challenges facing the technical and engineering communities?

Let’s keep this important debate going throughout this year and beyond.
Join with us to bring the technical and human rights communities together
to discuss how we can take these ideas forward together. Human rights need
to be at the forefront of any technical or policy discussion, which is why we
have suggested that human rights be the main theme of the IGF in
2012<http://bit.ly/16YGYK>
.

Joy Liddicoat
for the Association for Progressive Communications

2012/1/10 Grace Mutung'u (Bomu) <nmutungu at gmail.com>

> and here's another rejoinder:
>
> deepdip.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/internet-access-as-human-right-mr-cerf-shoots-himself-in-the-foot/
> Does the technology tail wag
> the human rights dog?
> In his recent op-ed in the NYT [1] Mr. CERF has argued
> that “internet access” is not a “human right” – though
> possibly a “civil right” – because “a technology is an
> enabler of rights, not a right itself”.
> His argumentation is catchy, but muddles the issues;
> Mr. CERF, it seems to me, ends up shooting himself in
> the foot.
> When he states: “the US never decreed that everyone
> has a ‘right’ to a telephone”, he means “universal
> service” – a telephone line strung to each and every
> door, or country- wide total network coverage for every
> citizen. Indeed, there is no right to total (or free)
> coverage - just as “freedom of the press” does not
> entitle every citizen to a free copy of the NYT every
> morning at her doorstep.
> When he states that “freedom of access” should
> ensure “freedom of speech etc.” he refers to the
> political conditions under which people who have
> access to communication media are entitled to
> communicate among each other: free of government
> interference. This personal right is e.g. enshrined in
> the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
> “Freedom of speech” is an abstract right. Its exercise
> necessarily relies on technologies: from the human
> voice to paper, radio and so on – and must apply
> automatically to all supports through which it is
> exercised – internet being the latest (but certainly not
> the last) kid on the block. When radio or TV emerged
> in the US no one seriously argued that the “right to
> free speech” as enshrined in the First Amendment did
> not apply to them “because they were only an
> enabler” . As long as content and support are
> inextricably wedded (and control of the content would
> be through the support) Mr. CERF’s argument
> “technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself” is
> spurious.
> The UN Declaration on Human Rights (UNDHR )[2] and
> the European Convention on Human Rights[3] are
> clear on the fact that the abstract right is embedded
> in the technologies.
> Mr. CERF goes on to make a distinction between
> “human right” and “civil right”. He likes “civil rights”
> better than “human rights” . He argues: “Civil rights are
> different from human rights because they are
> conferred upon us by law, not intrinsic to us as human
> beings.”
> By the same logic, Mr. CERF would reject the US
> Declaration of Independence, where it states: “We
> hold these truths to be self-evident , that all men are
> created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
> with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
> Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” – for its
> character is “self-evident ” and universal. He would
> however endorse the Bill of Rights as positive law.
> “Human rights” are not self-executing : they represent
> legitimate aspirations – not obligations. Their role is to
> provide universal legitimacy for these aspirations. No
> government may be exonerated from addressing the
> moral obligation on grounds of cultural
> “exceptionalism” – cultural or otherwise; and it would
> have to justify to public opinion world-wide any
> curtailment of the aspiration.
> On the other hand each state ought to strive and
> concretize such aspirations through appropriate legal
> means, if and when politically and materially possible.
> This is not always the case, as US history retells. The
> Bill of Rights enshrines personal and political rights.
> Exercising such rights effectively presupposes
> economic independence – President Jefferson saw it
> that way already, when he hailed “free yeomanry” as
> the basis of the Republic. President F. D. Roosevelt
> proposed in 1944 that a “Second Bill of Rights” be
> passed to make the broad aspiration of economic
> rights secure in law. He did not succeed [4] . There is
> no “civil right” to hold a job today, though we may hold
> a universal aspiration that all have one, and Art. 22-25
> of UNDHR stipulate such “rights” .
> Would Mr. CERF really be ready to trade the universal
> aspiration to politically unfettered “internet access” for
> a commitment to equivalent enforceable and
> judiciable civil rights in this matter?
>
> On 09/01/2012, Victor Kapiyo <vkapiyo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > True McTim, the GA hasn't declared it as such yet. But the report (see:
> > http://documents.latimes.com/un-report-internet-rights/) by the
> > special rapporteur as presented to the GA is without doubt persuasive
> > authority on the subject and will (if not already) influence the
> treatment
> > by states of internet access. And as you rightly point out, many states
> > have already taken some positive steps.
> >
> >
> >
> > On 9 January 2012 11:16, McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi Victor,
> >>
> >> On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Victor Kapiyo <vkapiyo at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> > I would agree with Grace and disagree with Cerf to some extent.
> >> >
> >> > I think the internet has become an essential component of the human
> >> > condition, and perhaps that would explain the reasoning of the UN in
> >> > declaring access to the internet a human right.
> >>
> >>
> >> I don't believe that the UN has actually declared this a human right.
> >> Various Member States have passed laws declaring this, but the General
> >> Assembly of the UN has not (yet) to my knowledge actually enshrined
> >> Internet access as s human right.
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Cheers,
> >>
> >> McTim
> >> "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
> >> route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Victor Kapiyo, LL.B
> >
> > ====================================================
> > *“Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude” Zig
> Ziglar
> > *
> >
>
>
> --
> Grace L.N. Mutung'u (Bomu)
> Kenya
> Skype: gracebomu
> Twitter: GraceMutung'u (Bomu)
>

-- 
Grace L.N. Mutung'u (Bomu)
Kenya
Skype: gracebomu
Twitter: GraceMutung'u (Bomu)
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