Most people living outside of Maryland have never heard of Martin O’Malley, the twice-elected Governor of the state. He is nevertheless toying with the idea of running for President of the United States. That’s why he is attempting to overcome his state of relative anonymity by traveling the country, appearing at campaign events and speaking on behalf of Democrat candidates from coast to coast.
He’s also making a provocative comment or two designed intentionally — we assume — to get the attention of the media and raise his profile.
What kind of comments? Well, he’s the highest elected official we’re aware of who has come out and said that wifi is a human right.
CNN sums it up rather pithily:
Befitting his roots in city politics, O’Malley gushes about the re-birth of American cities, a renaissance he said is driven by young people who “have an awareness of our interdependence” and chafe at hierarchies and top-down leadership. He praises the power of technology to streamline government, slips terms like “innovation cluster” into his commentary, and name-drops the urban theorist Richard Florida.
“Baby boomers and older were often told that if we specialize in terms of our skills, we will be more secure and prosperous, that the definition of ‘making it” was living out in the suburbs as far way as possible with the biggest lawn possible,” he said. “Young people have flipped that on its head. Younger people are choosing to live in cities. They realize that connections to each other are making us better. That WiFi is a human right.” (emphasis ours)
CheapInternet.com has long spoken in support of inexpensive internet access for low-income Americans. Nevertheless, we think O’Malley may not understand exactly what a human right is, because while inexpensive broadband access is increasingly important to millions of low-income Americans, we have a bit of trouble when we hear a pandering politician cheapen the concept of human rights.
Here’s how Wikipedia explains the concept of human rights:
Human rights are moral principles or norms that describe certain standards of human behaviour, and are regularly protected as legal rights in national and international law. They are commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights “to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being,” and which are “inherent in all human beings” regardless of their nation, location, language, religion, ethnic origin or any other status. They are applicable everywhere and at every time in the sense of being universal, and they are egalitarian in the sense of being the same for everyone. They require empathy and the rule of law and impose an obligation on persons to respect the human rights of others. They should not be taken away except as a result of due process based on specific circumstances, and require freedom from unlawful imprisonment, torture, and execution.
…while there is consensus that human rights encompasses a wide variety of rights such as the right to a fair trial, protection against enslavement, prohibition of genocide, free speech, or a right to education, there is disagreement about which of these particular rights should be included within the general framework of human rights; some thinkers suggest that human rights should be a minimum requirement to avoid the worst-case abuses, while others see it as a higher standard. (Other human rights include) … right to work, to education, health and housing.”
We’ve scoured Wikipedia’s article on human rights and we have been unable to find any reference to low-cost or free wifi. We truly believe that it cheapens the term “human right” to assume an equivalence between free wifi and “real” human rights such as freedom of religion, freedom of speech, protection against slavery, and prohibition of genocide.
But in the interest of full disclosure, O’Malley is far from being alone in placing wifi on the list of inalienable human rights.
Consider Finland. Since mid-2010, every Finnish telecommunications company has been required to offer “reasonably-priced” high-speed broadband service to every permanent residence and office.
In March 2010, a poll conducted for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) found that 79% of adults in 26 countries agreed that “access to the internet should be a fundamental right of all people”.
So people want free or inexpensive wifi. So do we. But to repeat, elevating a technology to the level of a human right raises some interesting questions:
Would it be a violation of your human rights if your internet service goes down? Does that mere fact that it went down become a violation or does it have to be down for some predetermined period of time? Is it a violation of your human rights if it goes down for a day? An hour? Ten minutes? What if your internet access doesn’t go down, but the upload and download speed is too slow? Is that a violation of your human rights? Does elevating free wifi to the level of human right mean that everything on the internet is a human right? Does watching porn become a human right? What about snuff films?
To repeat: No one has banged the drum for free and cheap internet longer nor louder than we have. It is our entire raison d’être. We just don’t want to see it mandated and we don’t want it equated with human rights. Because when we take the argument that far, real human rights lose.
But that’s just us. We’re not on the campaign trail pandering for votes in Democrat primary elections.
Source: CNN
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