Human Right and Internet Access: A philosophical investigation

Abstract

As of December 2014, there are three billion Internet users worldwide, of which 649 million are Chinese. This number will grow in the years to come. This technology, of course, possesses immense significance in our everyday life. What is currently new in international human rights practice is the trend of discussing Internet access as a potential human right. A BBC poll showed that of twenty-seven thousand interviewees worldwide, almost 80% believed that Internet access should be regarded as a fundamental right. The UN has been putting much effort into the spreading of telecom infrastructure. It also recently issued a report suggesting that Internet access should be regarded as a human right, which might entail intervention against a government that had arbitrarily cut off the Internet access of its citizens. Those proposals demonstrate the importance of the current social context, within which any proposal of Internet access as a fundamental human right has to be evaluated. However, despite the vigorous discussions in the legal-political arena, philosophical studies on the subject are still quite sporadic and preliminary. In this dissertation, I attempt to justify a human right to Internet access by referring to its instrumental value in promoting and protecting democracy. Therefore, I discuss not only the normative idea of democracy, but also how Internet use might contribute to its protection and promotion. The thesis consists of six chapters, dealing with several questions. First, I investigate the empirical evidence relating to Internet access and the protection and promotion of democracy (chapters I and II). Making the assumption that democracy is one of the important human rights, and considering the instrumental value of Internet access for democracy, I try to defend the thesis that Internet access should be seen as a derived human right (chapters III and IV). Since I am particularly interested in the role of Internet access in China, I study the extent to which Confucianism might play a role in justifying or rejecting a human right to Internet access(chapters V and VI).