IDG News reports that the European Parliament has negotiated a telecom bill that “now contains a new Internet freedom provision that states that access to the Internet is a human right of every E.U. citizen, and that if authorities take away that right people must have the opportunity to defend themselves.” If indeed the bill merely creates what Americans would recognize as a “due process” right against government action, that may not be such a bad thing. IDG notes that, “The issue is very sensitive, and not just in Europe, where a number of countries including France and U.K. are passing laws threatening to sever users’ Internet connections if they are found to have breached the copyright on music or movies.” Whatever one thinks of such “three strikes” laws as a remedy for copyright infringement, it seems reasonable that users should indeed have the right to “defend themselves” if accused of copyright violations before their Internet access is turned off.
But we should all be uncomfortable anytime government purports to invent a new “fundamental right” if that right is a “positive” one—i.e., a moral entitlement to a particular product or service that must be guaranteed by other taxpayers paying for something someone can’t afford or simply doesn’t value enough to pay for out of their own pocket. That’s precisely what Finland recently did, guaranteeing Finns the “right” to a 1 megabit broadband connection. That sort of entitlement is pure cyber-collectivism. Cyber-libertarianism recognize instead that:
true “Internet freedom” is freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some amorphous “public interest”—an all-to convenient facade behind which unaccountable elites can impose their will on the rest of us.
So if the Europeans want to guarantee a due process right, I hope they would find another term for that concept doesn’t have such cyber-collectivist implications.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.