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The fight to keep the internet free and open for everyone (2019)
- nonrandomstring 5y agoThere's a subtle but deadly important point lurking in here: "The internet is a human right," agrees Assani, who also runs a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting digital service... "All people have the right to use the internet." Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has appeared before the UN to state that the inter et "belongs to everyone". Vint Cerf doesn’t agree. He wrote an editorial in the New York Times dismissing the notion that internet access was a human right. Cerf posited that as a technology, the internet was an enabler of rights, and confusing the two would lead to us valuing the wrong things. "At one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living, But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. The internet was a means to an end, and not the end itself." I really agree with Vint Cerf here. Because what worries me MUCH more than the "right to be connected to the internet", is the right NOT to be. That is going to be the real battleground for rights in the future. Naturally when Zuckerberg says the "Internet is for everyone", he means that in a very _strong_ sense.