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The Internet at 40 – is it a Human Right?

Robin Hague

The world needs an end to the digital divide

On March 10, 1876, employing the world’s only telephone and uttering this uninspiring summons - “Mr Watson, come here, I need you” - Alexander Graham Bell ushered in a new era of communication and unwittingly invented electronic social networking.

Six years and 10 months earlier, to the day, at Promontory Point in Utah, a gold-spike was driven into the rail connecting the Central and Union Pacific Railroads, creating the world’s first transcontinental transport system.

A full century later, on the 29th of October 1969, forty years ago today, UCLA undergraduate Charley Kline tapped out a message on a computer linked to another at Stanford Research Institute. Even less memorable than Bell’s first telephone call, Kline underwhelmingly launched the Internet with the word “Login.”

These were three of the most momentous dates in modern communications, industry and entertainment. The world reaching out to itself. None of the participants would recognise the significance of the moment. In Boston, Alexander Graham Bell could only dream of a time when there would be “a telephone in every American town.” Now there is a telephone in nearly every American hand.

From the telephone, the train and the Internet have sprung boundless leaps forward in human experience and communication. Peace has not broken out, but we are much closer to each other. We can enjoy the fruits of each other’s labour and knowledge, share pain, joy, love and miserably, even hate.

Yet, as we mark the 40th Birthday of the Internet, we are challenged by yet another social gap, one marked out, not in euros or dollars, but in bytes, an ever growing digital divide that separates communities in even the world’s richest countries and threatens our very human progress.

Furthermore, efforts to narrow this gap, to enrich those marooned on an Internet desert island, are being deliberately disputed.

In the United States, the Obama Administration this year announced a $7.2-billion dollar fund to finance the roll-out of broadband access throughout the country, particularly to those forgotten rural areas where a broadband drought has dragged down the US to 24th in the International Telecommunications Union ranking of broadband penetration.

A full 30 percent of the United States is still considered frontier land, encompassing one in four of the country’s 3,190 counties. 50-million people, one-sixth of the US population, live in rural communities.

Only 10-million of these have broadband access, leaving 40-million in digital darkness. Yet, in rural America, small firms account for 9 out of 10 businesses and two-thirds of jobs.

These firms and jobs are disappearing as broadband enabled companies unwittingly kill them off through all forms of e-commerce; retail, knowledge, service provision.

School children in these communities also suffer as their rural schools cannot provide them with the full range of study aids, information and IT training required to be able to fully participate, compete and succeed in modern life.

Without the intervention of the Government, in a project that echoes the new Deal initiatives of the Depression-era Roosevelt Administration, the digital divide in the US would expand exponentially and a new, informational dust-bowl would arise.

Yet, the right-wing Citizens Against Government Waste campaign, has so far lodged objections to 23 applications for broadband stimulus grants totaling $550 million, submitted to the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA).

More objections are on the way from an embittered organization apparently bent on wasting even more taxpayers’ money in the inevitable support that would have to be meted out to those continuing to fall victim to the digital poverty gap.

In the UK, the government’s Digital Britain project aims for Universal Connectivity, broadband for all, albeit at a measly 2 Mbps.

UK broadband penetration appears robust, but behind the figures lie other statistics, such as the 80 percent reliance on DSL, with speeds drastically slowing as they arrive at the outer reaches of the lines.

Dissatisfaction with broadband is predictably highest in rural areas of the country, where, as in the US, businesses suffer as their customers are serviced by suppliers enjoying full, high-speed broadband access.

British rural schools are also troubled, teachers and pupils alike frustrated by grimly slow connections. These communities, which already pay more for their fuel, are forced into £70 per month charges for slow and intermittent broadband access.

Jovially defined as broadband ‘not-spots’, these villages and towns face the same fate as in the US, unless there is Government intervention. For why is there any current incentive for commercial providers to supply broadband to expensively remote communities?

As part of its Digital Britain goals, the Government aims to raise up to £175-million a year through a 50p per month broadband tax. Yet, as we reported on FreebandTVNews last week, Her Majesty’s Conservative Opposition, likely winners in next year’s election, plans to scrap the tax.

On the Conservative party’s website there is currently no stated plan for broadband access across the UK.

As developed nations, the US and UK shamefully lag behind other First World commitments to broadband penetration. In Finland, all of the country’s 5.3-million citizens will have to be offered connections by next Summer.

In New Zealand, the Government has launched a broadband roll-out in which it will soak up the commercial risk of the entire fibre network.

Admittedly these last two are vastly smaller, either in population or physical terms, than the US and UK. Nonetheless, their Governments recognise the need and in New Zealand’s case, rolling out broadband is as expensive per capita as in the UK, given their similarly sized landscapes.

For people living in the 21st Century, perhaps we should regard broadband as a Human Right.

Clearly, it does not equate with Articles 1 through 6 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which demand freedom, security and equality, an end to discrimination, torture and slavery and the right to justice.

Yet, forty years on from its bland first word, is the Internet not essential to Articles 18 to 20, enshrining the rights to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, this right including “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”?

If we cannot provide broadband Internet in the First World, how can we expect developing nations to join us in our freedoms, our development and our riches? For a look at how serious the digital divide is in Africa, see our story “Massive mobile growth on the African continent”.

Just as coal, minerals, timber, animals and land were the raw materials that shaped life over the past millennium, broadband Internet is a raw material to take us into the future. But more than that, it may now be a fundamental human right.

Those who would stand in its way, should go carefully.

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