Merten Reglitz's "Free Internet Access as a Human Right"

Merten Reglitz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Free Internet Access as a Human Right, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book does two things. It first concludes and summarises the argument of chapter 4. This argument is that internet access should be recognised as a human right because having such access has become necessary for having sufficient or adequate opportunities to exercise our political human rights (e.g. free speech, free information, free assembly) today. Secondly, page 99 introduces a crucial objection to this argument, namely that we don’t need a new, stand-alone human right to internet access because such access is already protected by our existing human rights such as our right to free speech. Beyond page 99, the chapter goes on to discuss and to defuse this objection.

Page 99 gives you a good idea of what the book is like because it summarises one of its central arguments. Moreover, the consideration of an objection is central for building and defending philosophical arguments. So page 99 contains some of the essential elements of a philosophical work, which this book is. At the same time, page 99 is not representative of the book. This is because it doesn’t contain any examples of how the internet is used by people, governments, and companies. It also doesn’t contain any explanation of how these uses of the internet matter morally, and for our human rights. These examples and their normative analysis make up much of the book.

This combination of philosophical argumentation with normative analysis of examples of internet use is a crucial contribution that the book makes to the existing literature. Philosophers and other researchers have discussed individual aspects of the internet. They have investigated e.g. what the internet has done to people’s understanding of knowledge, how it has enabled more powerful ways of expressing ourselves, what new ways of misinformation it unfortunately also makes possible, or how it has transformed how we spend our time and interact with each other. What the book does with these considerations (and many other examples) is to make the case for a new universal entitlement that would guarantee a minimum internet connection for everyone and which, importantly, will require public institutions to ensure a certain quality of internet access for people. This should be such that the internet can be used as an empowering medium, rather than one that is used to maximise profits, monitor populations and oppress political opponents, or to misinform and manipulate. The book’s main conclusion is that public institutions ought to adopt a new human right to free internet access as a foundation of a vision of the internet that, as the UN hopes, will contribute to “the progress of mankind as a whole.”

Learn more about Free Internet Access as a Human Right at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue