What was life like before the internet? Remember (or, if you cannot, imagine) what people had to do to obtain information about something they wanted to know. How did they get their news? How did they interact with public services? How did they communicate with family and friends – especially those far away? What options did they have to express their views to their fellow citizens and those who ruled over them? How did they entertain themselves? How did they shop? But also: how could other people know about a person’s most intimate interests or thoughts? How could governments know what people were talking about in private with their friends? And what power did individuals have to misinform others by spreading rumours or lies? Whether we think that we are overall better off or not for having it around, it is certain that the internet has changed all these things (and most aspects of life) for everyone who can access and use it.

In fact, the internet has fundamentally changed people’s opportunities to enjoy and exercise some of their most important possessions: their human rights. This is unsurprising if we consider two things. First, the internet permits the creation, transmission, recording, and searching of information in unprecedented ways. Second, all human rights rely on information. Either they are directly about information (e.g. the rights to free information, education, free speech, to take part in cultural life, or to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications) or information is essential for them (e.g. health, security of person, political participation, freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, and for the prevention of threats to liberty, and freedom from torture by holding to account those who hold power). In the latter case, we need information, for example, to know how to stay or become healthy, to know and avoid threats to our safety, to form religious beliefs, to hold those to account who abuse their power. Today, whether one has internet access or not naturally matters for how well we can make use of our human rights. The Human Rights Council of the United Nations (UN) generally agreed with this diagnosis when it asserted that the internet ‘has become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress’ (UN 2011a: 22). However, contrary to some reports that appeared in the global press after its General Assembly had passed a non-binding resolution on The Promotion, Protection, and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet (UN 2016) in 2016, the UN has not recognised a stand-alone human right to the internet as such.

This is essentially why this book makes the argument that public authorities should recognise free access to the internet as a new human right itself. By ‘free’ I mean two things: internet access should be provided free of charge for those unable to afford it; and it should be free from arbitrary interference (i.e. unjustifiable obstructions and control) by others. As will become clear, the argument that free internet access ought to be a human right also implies the demand that certain uses of the internet are free (i.e. unobstructed and uncompromised). That is because, even though internet access deserves special protection as a human right since it has become practically indispensable for our existing human rights, it is alone insufficient for enjoying these rights. Rather, people must be able to access and use the internet to make use of and protect their human rights using online means. However, because free access is prior to use, and because the importance of free internet access implies the importance of free internet use, the new human right that this book argues for is called the human right to free internet access.

As we will see throughout the book, the stakes are high. If people are not able to access the internet, they face political, social, and cultural disadvantage and exclusion. Many of those digitally excluded are also denied important means for utilising at least to some degree some of their most essential human rights (e.g. education and medical care) when they currently cannot do so at all. Problematically, according to estimates of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU), 33 per cent of humanity (or 2.6 billion people) were still offline in 2023 (ITU 2023a: 1). Moreover, if people cannot access and use the internet freely, they are in danger of being monitored, manipulated, threatened, or targeted by others such as their government, profit-seeking companies, or other internet users. If the internet is used to frustrate their legitimate interests, people cannot enjoy many of their most basic rights without having to put themselves at risk. In the worst case, their internet use can even lead to their imprisonment or death. In 2022, the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Freedom House studied internet freedom in seventy countries that are home to 89 per cent of global internet users. It found that for more than 70 per cent of them the internet is either ‘not free’ or only ‘partially free’ (Freedom House 2022: 5), meaning that most internet users worldwide face some form of negative repercussions for accessing and using the internet for legitimate purposes. It was unimaginable not too long ago, but today a person’s message sent via the internet can capture the attention of millions, a video or post shared online can spark a social movement and change at societal level, and people can join together with others across the globe to promote political causes. On the other hand, though, a government can find out about a citizen’s most private beliefs by accessing their online search history or emails, private companies can tailor prices individually to consumers based on what they know about their interests, the police can identify and arrest homosexuals by surveilling online dating platforms, and oppressive regimes can identify their opponents domestically and abroad by monitoring what thoughts people express online. In this context, a new human right to internet access would give people an enforceable entitlement or (where this right is not respected) at least a strong argumentative resource to demand that they are guaranteed unrestricted access to and use of the internet.

What is the internet? When looking for a suitable definition, we can consult (as many people looking for information do) Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a fitting source for our purposes because it is itself something that has been made possible by the internet as the result of the online collaboration of thousands of contributors. According to Wikipedia – the self-described ‘largest and most-read reference work in history’ (Wikipedia 2021) – the internet

The internet has been called many things. Some have argued it is the greatest invention of all time (Weinberg Reference Weinberg2012). Some have said it has been less transformative than the washing machine (Skidelsky Reference Skidelsky2010). Others have argued that it has finally enabled humankind globally to realise one of our very species-specific activities, namely, to communicate and exchange things and ideas with people far away (Smith Reference Smith2022: 77). Whatever else we make of it, the development of this information communication technology (ICT) can certainly be considered a watershed moment in the social evolution of humanity, just as were the invention of the written word, the printing press, or electricity. The internet, however, is more than just another technical invention or mass medium. Unlike books, newspapers, TV programmes, and radio stations that were previous innovations in how people communicated information, the internet presents another step in human development for at least two reasons. First, it makes the information it is used to transmit individually searchable. Given how much information there is in this world, this is something extraordinarily useful. Second, it allows individuals, with only insignificant costs or technical knowledge, to become senders of information and creators of content that can potentially reach all around the globe and vast numbers of people (Dutton Reference Dutton2023). No other medium has therefore increased the informational and communicative power of individual human beings as the internet. With this increase in power come enormous opportunities for both empowerment and oppression. The human right to free internet access wants to ensure that the internet is used for the former, not the latter.

As is the case with all technologies, the internet does not inevitably have good or bad consequences. Like television and radio programmes or newspapers, it can be used to promote vital universal interests and human progress, or to harm and control people. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was widespread optimism about the empowering capacities of the internet. In 2000, Bill Clinton famously argued that attempting to constrain the internet’s global power to expand opportunities for free speech was like ‘trying to nail Jello to the wall’ (Allen-Ebrahimian Reference Allen-Ebrahimian2016). However, by 2011 critics of this ‘cyber-utopianism’ such as Evgeny Mozorov (Reference Mozorov2011) had warned that autocrats were employing the internet not to liberate, but to oppress their subjects by using it to spread false information and to monitor populations for signs of dissent. Since at least the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, there has also been growing awareness and concern about how private companies profit from gathering unprecedented personal information about their users. This knowledge, though, cannot only be used to sell advertising products and services, but also to target individuals with misinformation or politically divisive messages (Zuboff Reference Zuboff2019). Against any form of positive or negative ‘techno-determinism’ (i.e. the belief that a technology inevitably will have good or bad effects), though, a realistic assessment of the internet’s effects on human rights must conclude that its effects depend on how it is used, on how public authorities regulate its use, and whether governments themselves are misusing the possibilities it offers. Whether they do in turn crucially depends on public pressure and on what uses of the internet citizens allow their governments to get away with.

What seems certain is that humanity is extremely unlikely to abandon the internet.Footnote ¹ Given its usefulness for most aspects of people’s lives, ‘we couldn’t kill the Internet if we tried’ (Ohm Reference Ohm2016). The real question then is not whether the internet is good or bad, but rather how we shape it. The answer to this question is of momentous importance. But in the current ‘absence of a shared global vision’ for the internet (Freedom House 2021: 2), the competition for political global dominance between democracies and autocracies also produces rivalling visions for how the internet should be used. Despite the UN demand that ‘rights that people have offline must also be protected online’ (UN 2016: 2), autocratic states such as China and Russia use the internet to establish digital authoritarianism by using it to keep their subjects in check. To gain political influence and economic profit, these digital autocracies also export to other states technologies and knowledge for using ICT to oppress rather than to empower people. Meanwhile, governments of many (or maybe even most) democratic states also spy on their citizens and sometimes their political opponents. Many of their widespread online surveillance practices have been ruled illegal by their own independent courts (Casciani Reference Casciani2018, BBC News 2020) meaning that also these democracies do not respect what this book argues is people’s human right to access and use the internet freely. If the internet is to be an empowering technology and one that helps promote human rights and progress, what is therefore needed is a global vision for an internet that is beneficial for humankind. The argument proposed by this book, that public authorities should recognise a human right to free internet access and respect the obligations that come with it, would be an important step in creating such a progressive global vision for the internet.

The internet has been the subject of much research – technological and otherwise. What this book adds to the literature is a comprehensive analysis of the normative significance of the internet. The book is a work in moral philosophy. Moral philosophers investigate not so much what the world is like, but what (we have reasons to believe) it ought to be like. What the world is like is certainly essential for determining what it ought to be like (e.g. we cannot demand changes to human behaviour or institutions that are impossible). But the normative ideals and rules that moral philosophers research are essential for human beings as well. Without them, we often do not know what to do or what to aim at. Normative rules and ideals therefore have a guiding function. This book accordingly wants to provide what the epochal political philosopher John Rawls refers to as normative ‘orientation’ concerning the internet and what we have reasons to want it to be.Footnote ² It does so in two ways. In the first part, the book considers many ways in which the internet has changed people’s lives and in particular their opportunities for using and protecting their human rights. In this way, it explains why the internet’s effects matter (not only economically or socially, but also morally). In its second part, the book develops a set of standards, rules, and demands for how public authorities ought to treat and protect the internet, which together spell out the concept or idea of the human right to free internet access.

Of course, one might want to object against the formulation of this new right that it seems very unlikely that, for example, governments will not spy on their citizens, that capitalist firms will not thwart attempts to establish legislation to protect consumers’ interests that would prevent them from maximising their profits, or that individuals will not try to use the internet to threaten, verbally attack, and harass other people online. This scepticism, though, is not a good reason against calling for the recognition of a human right to free internet access. For one thing, we simply do not know what the future holds and how realistic or not the demands that this new right makes really are. But, more importantly, the plausibility of moral rules and standards does not depend on whether people are likely to adhere to them. ‘Do not kill the innocent’ and ‘do not wantonly lie’ are valid moral rules even though they are violated thousands of times each day. Correspondingly, even though governments, private firms, and some individuals will disregard a universal right to free internet access and use, the rules and demands that this right entails can nonetheless be justified. And also for those who fight for free internet access and use, spelling out the idea of this novel right can have an important function. This is because, once we have a grasp of why there should be a human right to free internet access and what such a right plausibly encompasses, this idea can serve as a normative goal and argumentative support for their cause.

The project of formulating a new human right is inevitably an interdisciplinary one. Moral philosophy can provide knowledge of relevant values, theories, and principles, and it can establish normative arguments. But it does not itself offer the required information about the subject matter itself, that is, about the internet as a technology and the effects it has on people and society. The facts about these empirical realities instead are supplied by other experts, and the book’s normative analysis of the internet is squarely dependent on the empirical knowledge that they can provide. For this reason, this book heavily relies on facts and insights about the internet from other academic disciplines such as computer science, law, medical science, educational science, economics, psychology, communication and media studies, development studies, but also from non-academic experts such as public institutions (e.g. the UN Human Rights Council, the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, the UN’s Broadband Commission, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the European Commission), NGOs (e.g. the Alliance for Affordable Internet, Freedom House, Access Now, the Good Things Foundation), and reputable press sources such as the BBC, the New York Times, or The Guardian. Some empirical data that non-philosophical experts provide are simply facts or best available statistics (e.g. the number of existing internet users worldwide). However, other data is more contentious (e.g. the percentage of populations stuck in echo chambers or the number of people who accept online conspiracy narratives), and where this is the case, contrary claims and studies are considered as well. Even though the work of this book would be impossible without the knowledge provided by empirical research, it primarily establishes a moral argument based on this best available and critically considered evidence, namely that these facts point towards the conclusion that people should have a universally recognised freedom to be able to freely access and use the internet to enjoy their human rights. Of course, much of what people do online does not have anything to do with their human rights. These other uses are morally not important enough to be able to establish a demand for something as serious as a human right. But the practical indispensability that the internet has assumed for our existing human rights can, or so I shall argue.

What is important to note from the start when approaching this book’s argument for a new human right is that what is (philosophically and morally) needed is not ‘invention’ or ‘making up an idea’, but rather a process of discovery. What rights people should have is not simply up to what the majority thinks or what the law currently happens to say. Rather, as the philosopher Henry Shue (whose work on rights will be crucial for the work of this book) explains, which rights people have and should be recognised ultimately depends on the ‘weight of reasons’ (Shue Reference Shue2020: 73). That is, if we want to know what rights people possess or should be granted, it is not enough to look at an existing list of legally codified rights. In many places around the world, people are denied essential entitlements such as human rights even though morally they clearly possess them and should have them respected. Moreover, new technologies (e.g. the development of mRNA vaccines) can change what existing rights (e.g. the human right to healthcare) entail or what rights people have in the first place (e.g. the common availability of mobile phones with cameras has necessitated a new right against ‘upskirting’ to deter some men from committing the obviously wrong act of taking a photograph up women’s skirts). We therefore have to consider, case by case, in light of the best available evidence, what morally relevant interests people have that are strong enough to warrant attributing to them a right that protects these interests. Along these lines, this book argues that there are weighty reasons for lawmakers to recognise that everyone today should have a human right to free internet access because we no longer have adequate opportunities to exercise our existing rights without it.

There is of course a question about the normative grounds of such an argument. What exactly is the basis that such a process of discovering a novel right can start from? How can we be sure that the argument that this book makes rests on a reasonable and respectable normative foundation? The question of the grounds of moral reasoning and first principles in moral philosophy is always a difficult and controversial one because few things are universally accepted to matter decisively so that entire complex arguments and principles can be based on them. However, this book employs a morally, political, and legally well-established normative framework, namely that of accepted international human rights. It considers how the internet has affected our existing human rights. Based on this, it uses the consequences that the introduction of this digital technology has had to argue that we now need an additional human right to free internet access because such digital freedom has become too essential to leave it up to the good will of governments or private companies and the differing financial fortunes and misfortunes of individuals. Human rights are certainly not all that matters morally. There are, for instance, fundamental questions about what a just distribution of the socio-economic surplus that societies produce has to look like that exceed what human rights demand. But there is a lot of (even though by no means universal) agreement that human rights do matter if anything does. And because of this, today free internet access matters fundamentally as well because the practical value that our human rights have for us can now depend on whether we can freely exercise and advocate for them online. Existing human rights are therefore the normative foundation of this book’s argument.

The fundamental moral importance of human rights, though, also makes the project of justifying a new human right to free internet access a particularly challenging one. After all, human rights are in a sense the most important rights we have because they are the most basic ones. For this reason, only the most essential things should be recognised as human rights. As the legal philosopher James Nickel (whose work is also of fundamental importance for this book) explains, candidates for human rights must fulfil several strict criteria:

1. 1. They must be relevant for people’s most fundamental and morally most urgent interests.

2. 2. More specifically, they must provide social guarantees against substantive and recurring threats to the urgent interests in question.

3. 3. The urgent interests protected must be of universal rather than local or national importance because human rights matter to all humans.

4. 4. They must be essential in the sense that no weaker norm (e.g. helping people to help themselves or voluntary aid of others) could provide the required protections.

5. 5. Their fulfilment must not cause unjustifiable financial or moral burdens on others (e.g. require for its implementation unreasonable funds, that we deprive others of their rights, or that we negatively impact on their health).

6. 6. They must be feasible in a majority of countries right now lest most states become liable to criticism that they have not realised something that they lack the means for. (Nickel Reference Nickel2007: 70–79)

However, despite these challenging requirements, we will see throughout the book that internet access indeed has become such a thing that can meet all six of these demanding criteria. To establish the argument that free internet access is a human right, the book is divided into two parts. Part I presents the normative case for the idea. Part II spells out the details of what accepting the idea entails in terms of obligations for public authorities. Each part consists of four chapters. To conclude this introduction, what follows is a short overview of the chapters of the book.

Chapter 1 discusses the very idea of human rights. Without knowing what human rights are, we also cannot understand whether internet access should be one of them. The chapter will outline the philosophical view that human rights have the function to protect the conditions of minimally decent lives. In doing so, it also explains (1) why it makes sense to talk of a moral human right that does not yet exist but that should become recognised by public authorities as a legal entitlement, (2) why there is no problem as such with the demand that something should be a human right that is a modern technology, and (3) why internet access is not sufficiently protected for people if it is made part of, or subsumed under, already existing human rights such as free speech.

Chapter 2 provides us with the other technical tools that we need to make the argument that free internet access should be a human right. These are the ideas of linkage arguments and derivative rights, with the former establishing the latter based on their usefulness for other rights. In this chapter, we will also take a look at how rights generally function, that is, the way that they create duties for others (most prominently public institutions) to respect and protect their object for the right-holder, and obligations to aid the right-holder in case their rights are not fulfilled or violated. Moreover, the chapter explains that rights generally have the point of ensuring that people have adequate (rather than merely formal or implausibly maximal) opportunities to make use of their rights. The reasoning that underpins linkage arguments is essential because this book does not claim that internet access is a good in itself. Rather, the demand it makes for a new right is entirely grounded in the usefulness of internet access for the realisation of other human rights.

Chapter 3 presents evidence for the book’s core claim that internet access today is practically indispensable if we are to have adequate opportunities to enjoy and use our human rights – specifically our civil and political human rights such as our rights to free speech, free assembly, free information, political participation, security of person, liberty, and equality before the law. The chapter outlines numerous ways in which the internet has made all of these rights more effective by giving people either new ways to exercise them or to protect them from abuse. These unprecedented opportunities, though, have also created a situation where those who do not have internet access are disadvantaged to the extent that they have to be considered politically excluded. Because such exclusion is incompatible with our human rights, internet access must be seen as a universal entitlement.

Chapter 4 makes a parallel case for the importance of internet access with respect to socio-economic human rights such as the ones to education, health, work, social security, and cultural participation. Also with respect to these, people who cannot access the internet are relatively disadvantaged to others who can use online opportunities to enjoy these rights. That is, for them digital exclusion translates into social exclusion. In conjunction with Chapter 3, Chapter 4 presents the normative core and the justificatory argument of the book. At its end (which is also the end of Part I), we will have a good grasp of the fact that internet access today is no longer a matter of convenience or a luxury for those who can afford it. Rather, we have to acknowledge that around the world internet access has become a basic utility that is practically indispensable for the enjoyment of our most essential rights.

Part II details what follows from accepting the human right to free internet access. It is doing this by considering which serious standard threats people are confronted with when they want to access the internet. By identifying these standard threats, we can also determine what public authorities have to do to prevent them. Moreover, as Nickel’s test makes clear, understanding the standard threats to free internet access also in part explains why we need this novel right. Not only has it become essential in many ways for us. Additionally, our enjoyment of internet access cannot be presumed but rather has to be ensured and protected in certain ways.

Chapter 5 identifies poverty as the first standard threat to internet access. As mentioned earlier, large parts of humanity remain offline – mostly because they currently lack and cannot afford the necessary conditions for it. The chapter therefore identifies what public authorities would have to do to ensure that everyone can go online. It addresses four dimensions of internet access: data services, digital devices, broadband infrastructure, and basic digital skills. If people lack one of these, they cannot go online. Chapter 5 identifies a global standard of duties with respect to all four dimensions that is currently feasible for most states to guarantee for their citizens and everyone who cannot themselves afford the necessary tools. It thereby explains that one meaning of ‘free’ internet access is that the latter should be provided free of charge for those unable to afford it. Moreover, the chapter specifies certain minimal obligations that even those countries that currently cannot afford to realise internet access for all their citizens can and have to fulfil.

Chapter 6 investigates states as standard threats to free internet access. As public authorities, states have the primary obligation to protect and respect human rights. However, unfortunately, they are also major abusers of internet access for their own purposes. Autocratic regimes make internet access unfree by using it to spy on their citizens to identify and eliminate possible opponents, and to manipulate their subjects by feeding them certain information and by withholding other information from them. Democratic states make internet access unfree by monitoring their citizens and potential opponents for the sake of national security. The way they do this is highly extensive and problematic. The chapter therefore introduces the second meaning of ‘free’ internet access as that kind of online access that is free from arbitrary inferences, for example, by states, and which they instead have a duty to ensure.

Chapter 7 turns to private companies as standard threats to free internet access. Most of the internet’s network infrastructure and applications/content for users was developed by businesses, and today is owned and operated by them. Private corporations have used the fact that we can no longer avoid the internet if we want to be socially and politically included to arbitrarily interfere with our human rights in various ways. For instance, they have subjected many routine uses of the internet to extensive surveillance for the purpose of harvesting and monetising our personal information. Some of the major internet-based companies also operate social media platforms whose rules and membership they decide. Their decisions therefore have major effects on our opportunities to use our human rights online, and this chapter will look at which sorts of influences are compatible and incompatible with keeping internet access and use free for their users. Moreover, it considers the matter of the neutral transfer or treatment of data on the internet, known as ‘net neutrality’. This standard has increasingly come under attacks by private companies as they hope to generate more profits by treating data unequally. Chapter 6 (like Chapters 4 and 5) considers all these issues with a view to what obligations public authorities would have by accepting the right to free internet access to guarantee the object of that right.

Chapter 8 finally considers internet users themselves as standard threats. This is because individuals can also use the internet to violate or threaten the rights of others when they engage in, for example, the spread of child pornography, revenge pornography, or when they defame or threaten others online. However, cyberspace must be a place where rights are enforced and respected. The chapter therefore outlines what states should do to ensure that people respect each other’s rights on the internet. However, this cannot be achieved by threatening punishments for offences alone. Rather, public education should come to encompass not only training of basic abilities to use the internet, but also digital media literacy as well as training in non-vicious online behaviour by teaching people the negative effects of abusing each other online. The chapter also argues that to make the internet a safe place it also has to be part of a larger healthy information environment that must include, for example, independent public broadcast services to provide people with reliable and impartial sources of information. Without these, the internet is likely to confront people with a deluge of information that is difficult to manage, which might lead them to abuse the rights of others in response to their lack of orientation or out of malice.

At its end, this book has made the case for a novel human right. But in doing so, it also contributes to a philosophical understanding of the moral importance of the internet. In this way, it hopes to outline part of a global vision for an internet that is empowering rather than an instrument of oppression. If public authorities were to adopt this new human right, respect the obligations it entails, and work towards a situation in which others also accept these duties, the internet could really contribute to the ‘progress of humankind as a whole’ (UN 2011a: 19), as the UN hopes. No doubt there are and will be other challenges that exceed the scope of this book. However, the chapters outlined here cover some of the most pressing problems that we are currently faced with concerning this medium. Bar some catastrophic events or developments, we will not get rid of the internet. Because we will not, we had better get it right, which would require that all of humanity can freely go online and use the internet without the morally unjustifiable interferences of others. It is therefore time to accept free internet access as a human right.