Tim Berners-Lee: Internet Access Is a Human Right

14 Apr, 2011 by Dave Blount

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Now that we are endowed with our fundamental rights not by our Creator, but by the liberal ruling class, practically anything can qualify as a human right. Tim Berners-Lee found one right where you might expect:

Two decades after creating the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee says humans have become so reliant on it that access to the Web should now be considered a basic right.

Too bad Henry Ford didn’t think to declare a new car to be a basic right. Think of the government-subsidized sales it would have brought him. After all, humans are reliant on transportation, so shouldn’t they all be provided with a new car? (Apologies to the memory of Henry Ford, who was not a looter.)

In a speech at an MIT symposium, Berners-Lee compared access to the Web with access to water. While access to water is a more fundamental right, because people simply cannot survive without it, Web access should be seen as a right, too, because anyone who lacks Web access will fall behind their more connected peers.

Don’t forget, a computer would have to be a human right too. Web access doesn’t do you much good without a computer. Then you need a power supply, a desk to put the computer on, a comfy chair for the desk…

This will be difficult for liberals to grasp, but not only is Internet access not a fundamental right, neither is water. You have a right to be left alone to acquire your own water, your own computer, and your own Internet access — and you have a right not to be forced into slave labor to pay for anyone else’s.

When moonbats talk about rights, a concept beyond their comprehension, they are actually talking about tyranny.

It’s a short step from Berners-Lee’s flaky posturing to something more ominous. At the same symposium:

[MIT Media Lab creator Nicholas] Negroponte used his time on stage to reflect on both the MIT Media Lab and the One Laptop Per Child project, which has supplied millions of cheap computers to children in some of the world’s poorest countries. Negroponte’s project could be seen as extending the idea that the Web is a basic human right with concrete action, putting laptops in the hands of children who otherwise would not get them. …

The free market alone would not have been a great enough force to accomplish this, he said.

The natural transition from a progressive’s concept of “rights” to the alleged failings of the free market confirms that we are not talking about liberty, but about its diametric antithesis, collectivism.

If it makes you feel good about yourself to donate a free laptop that a Peruvian goatherd can use to prop open the door of his hut, go for it. But if the laptops are acquired coercively, that is theft, no matter how noble the thieves think they are as they preen at their podiums. Obviously, they won’t stop with laptops.