Fast Broadband To Be Classed a Fundamental Right in the UK (bbc.com)

Mark Wilson writes: Every home and business in the UK will have access to "fast broadband" by 2020. This is the latest pledge from Prime Minister David Cameron, who said access to the internet "should be a right." At the moment, 83% of homes and businesses in Britain have access to broadband connections 24Mbps and faster. By 2017, this is expected to rise to 95%. The latest plan is directed at the "last 5 percent" — such as people in remote areas — and will oblige broadband providers to supply at least 10Mbps broadband to anyone who demands it.

Comments

Fundamental right?????

[Nutria]

When everything is a fundamental right, then that completely devalues the definition of "fundamental".

Re:Fundamental right?????

[vux984]

When everything is a fundamental right, then that completely devalues the definition of "fundamental".

Internet access should be enshrined as a right. This extends beyond just remote rural citizens to everyday citizens everyday lives.

I'm sure you recall the scene in the matrix where Neo demands his call and they edit out his mouth. "What good is a phone call if you can't speak..."

In modern society the internet is replacing the post office. We increasingly use it to commuicate with eachother and with our government.

To deny someone the internet in 2020 is akin to denying them the post office in 1920. Not only should access be mandated, but it really should be enshrined as a right -- such that it cannot be easily curtailed by a judge or future legislators at whim.

Re:Fundamental right?????

[Nutria]

What if access to the railroads had been enshrined a fundamental right back in the 1940s? After all, "freedom of movement", right? But that would have stifled the growth of roads, and we're much more mobile now than we were 70 years ago. Same thing with newspapers and freedom of speech.

It's infinitely better that fundamental rights be generically written so as not to tie civilization to any one specific technology.

Re:Fundamental right?????

[x0ra]

Right to own and bear arms.

Re:Fundamental right?????

[vux984]

It's infinitely better that fundamental rights be generically written so as not to tie civilization to any one specific technology.

I don't disagree with you, and your not wrong. First, RTFA...

--
The PM is to introduce a "universal service obligation" for broadband, giving the public a legal right to request an "affordable" connection.

It would put broadband on a similar footing to other basic services such as water and electricity.
--

Its not being enshrined as an amendment to the magna carta or something.

It's infinitely better that fundamental rights be generically written so as not to tie civilization to any one specific technology.

And while I agree with this. If they don't pass legislation to "enshrine" specific technology then its legal status is indeterminate and in limbo until the courts set binding precendents. Especially since the courts are bound by the law as it is written, not the will of the people or even common sense. Which is precisely the wrong way to go about protecting your rights. Its good to proactively legislate that certain technologies are captured by your more abstract rights.

Finally, to your railroad argument vs freedom of movement; I offer you the modern air travel "no-fly list"... as an example where if something is not explicitly enshrined you get bullshit like this that will take decades to work out. The internet has a lot in common with it, and someone who wishes to deny you the internet simply argues ... your freedom of speech is not curtailed: you can still say what ever you want to people in person; you just can't say it on the internet....

I applaud any nation that proactively says: "Noope. We're not having that nonsense here. Denying you the internet is a violation of your rights. All citizens should have affordable access." And if in the year 2400 such a ruling on the books is as quaint as those ordinances that still require the school house to stable your horse... so be it. (Although I am in favor of a better system of removing obsolete law than we have now.)

Re:Fundamental right?????

[vux984]

It's worth pointing out that in the U.S. there is absolutely no requirement in the Constitution for a postal service

Article 1 Section 8's enumeration of Power of Congress are implicitly also exclusively *reserved* for Congress.

For example Congress is not merely empowered to establish currency; this task is reserved for congress. Congress is not merely empowered to declare wars or maintain the navy; the power to declare wars and maintain navies *rests* with congress. The states can't establish their own currencies, navies, nor declare their own wars.... nor can they establish their own post offices.

Historically, the post office was as important to congress as the military -- indeed it was critical and essential communications infrastructure for government to function. To say the constitution was written to "merely empower" congress to establish a post office as if to say it opens up the possibility that they could do it if they chose to is absurd.

Franky, in 2015, I think one could argue that Congress has the constitutional authority stemming from the postal service clause to build a national public internet. To interpret the establishment of 'post offices and post roads' as allowing them to run cables, and provision land, install servers etc. The purpose of the post office is to deliver communications between people after all. The internet is making the post office obsolete, because when all is said and done the internet *is* an automated computerized post office.

Surely you aren't going to argue that the fact that we don't print packets on paper and carry them by horseback from node to node (as the founders intended!!) is an issue? This is /. after all; and we've been mocking people for years for acting like doing some 100 year old thing "on a computer" makes it different than the original thing in some important way.

Re:Fundamental right?????

[Hognoxious]

Really? Like women have in Saudia Arabia?

Re:Fundamental right?????

[shellbeach]

"Rights" aren't something given by a government, they are something we all have, simply by existing.

... as determined by ...? You? Me? Everybody as they see fit?

The UN universal declaration of human rights would be as close as you're going to get to consensus. But I'm afraid the right to bear arms didn't make the cut.

Re:Fundamental right?????

[Ol Olsoc]

Right to own and bear arms.

Right to own and arm bears?

Now that would be an awesome sport.

Re:Fundamental right?????

[onthemightofprinces]

It's a 'right' that nobody in the UK wants. In fact we ourselves petitioned the government to ban handguns and the like because we considered the right to life as more important than the right for gun companies to make a profit.

Re:Fundamental right?????

[nukenerd]

Its the UK , there is not [sic] right to own and bear arms.

Very few people in the UK have any wish to "own and bear arms". Most people find the idea repulsive, and certainly would not regard it as a "right"; it is a different culture from wherever you are and always has been.

I say this as one of a tiny minority who has owned a firearm, as a member of a rifle club, and even I did not regard my ownership as a "right", but as something to qualify for. Anyway, last time I checked there is no great difficulty in owning a firearm if you are a bona-fide member of such a club, or have an identifiable need for one, such as a chicken farmer owning a shotgun to kill foxes. I live in a rural area and in fact my neighbour farmer has a shotgun, another of this tiny minority.

Re:Fundamental right?????

[fche]

"It's a 'right' that nobody in the UK wants." ... except those who do. If the "we" you're talking about were unanimous, it would not have needed a petition, never mind a law.

Re:Fundamental right?????

[davester666]

It's more of a "right not to be killed by a gun-bearing lunatic, right not to be killed by finding sometime lying around the house while you are growing up"

Re: Fundamental right?????

[x0ra]

The homicide rate in Canada or in France is nowhere near the homicide rate in the US, yet, we are allow to own guns.

Re:Fundamental right?????

[FlyHelicopters]

It's a 'right' that nobody in the UK wants.

"Nobody" is highly unlikely...

But in any case, you can't vote away your rights. If you could, then they wouldn't be rights.

We either have a civilization based on basic fundamental rights that exist because we do, or we're just thugs getting our way with brute force.

Take your pick...

---

Side note: Would you be ok with women losing the right to vote in the UK, if a petition passed to ban them from voting?

Re:Fundamental right?????

[silentcoder]

>Our creator...

No holy book ever written included a right to bear arms (or any mention of the topic at all).
So which creator did you have in mind and what is your reference that this is one of the rights he granted you ?
I haven't even asked for actual evidence he exists yet - just that there is one whose believers actually have a scripture supporting your claim.

>Without a creator, a higher being, then we're just brutish cavemen and it just becomes survival of the fittest.
If the only thing keeping you from being brutish is your faith in a higher being then I have news for you: you are brutish. Anything you are only refraining from doing because of your belief - is something you must own as being who you really are.

>The right to be armed is the right to self-defense. It is the right to be reasonably secure in ones own safety.

Well the holy books don't even agree that you HAVE a right to self defense. The most popular one, Jesus, specifically said the exact opposite: according to him if somebody hits you you are supposed to turn the other cheek and let them hit you again. You are supposed to love your enemies.

> Since the police don't have the job of keeping people safe, that is your own personal responsibility.
That is exactly the job the police have. What the hell do you think they are FOR ? I'm not saying they DO their job or do it well, but that job is the sole reason we have them.

>Being armed is one way to do that.
And now we enter the world of reality where we can actually measure some facts. No. It doesn't. In fact. Statistically - being armed increases your risk, it does not decrease it.
Not to mention by far (as in a massive margin) the biggest threat to your safety is yourself, and nothing increases that threat as much as being armed. Unarmed people who try to commit suicide mostly fail.

And it's interesting that while perceptions of violent crime keep going up... actual violent crime keeps going down. It's been on a downward spiral for decades and barring a few countries which are active war zones right now is the safest time to be alive in human history everywhere. So your risk of being attacked is at an all time low.
Your biggest risk in that regard if you're American is actually a mass shooting, and your best defence against THAT is to disarm the citizens.

When people without guns try mass-killings you may get one person badly injured, not dozens of dead people.
Here in my country we had a typical school-shooting scenario a few years ago... except the kid couldn't get a gun, so he took a japanese sword to school. He managed to kill one kid and injure another before he was taken down. If he had, had a machine gun the body count would have been much, much higher. Sandy-Hook higher.

Telescreens

[Anonymous Coward]

The bandwidth will be needed for our telescreens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

Curiously

[Burz]

No right to privacy, eh? If you're building a police state, it makes for a convenient combination of priorities.

For that matter, why not make free speech a fundamental right? Or has Cameron forgotten he's in the UK?

Re:A right does not obligate anyone to act

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and just like Ayn Rand you'll undoubtedly end up on benefits when you grow up, because there's no way anyone so profoundly selfish as you will make it very far in life by yourself. I'm sure you also don't ever travel on roads that other people have built right? I'm sure you're not currently using the very internet that was designed and developed as the result of government funded R&D yes? I'm sure you don't drink water pumped through government subsidised infrastructure right?

We're a social species, our very existence has depended on the fact that we've worked together to survive over the years. There's your fundamental fucking right, it is our evolved way. If you aren't part of that you're an anomaly in the human race, and are not fit to survive.

Going back to fundamentals as you put it, you would be easy fodder for those humans who have decided to work together whilst you isolate yourself and make yourself a trivial threat to dispatch. You shouldn't be here. The only reason you are is because civilisation and it's social aspects protect even idiots like you.

If you don't understand that humans are a social species, and working together is in our DNA, then you have serious problems.

Re:A right does not obligate anyone to act

[Bert64]

In the UK, there is already the right to have various other services (power, water, phone) at the same price anywhere in the country, so wether you live in london or the highlands of scotland you still get these services.
All they're changing, is "phoneline" now means that you must be able to get 10mbps internet access, ie they're just raising the minimum standard of what's already required.

Currently if you want a phoneline in a remote location, BT must install it for you and charge no more than they would for someone in a city, and that phoneline must be capable of carrying voice calls. This will result in an extremely long piece of copper that's not capable of handling ADSL at all.

Re:A right does not obligate anyone to act

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a right to free speech

The article is about the UK - therefore this is irrelevant. Whether or not you have free speech doesn't affect us in the UK.

Even saying that, rights have provisos. You have the right to live - but even in a certain "free" country that has different political regions - they call them States - some of these "States" will irreversibly revoke that right under certain circumstances. (And this is ignoring things like war)

I have the right to travel freely, does that obligate the government to buy me a car?

The Government not buying you a car doesn't mean you can't travel. I'm assuming you can get around without a car...? (To quote Eric Idle, "I have two legs from my hips to the ground. When I move them I walk around") Other Forms Of Transport Are Available.

I have the right to eat, does that obligate the government to buy me food?

You have the right to eat? Really?

A recent debate is that medical care is a "fundamental right". So I find myself in need of medical care, does that obligate the government to provide it?

It's a shame, really. The NHS was quite good. Bits of it still are. Successive Governments have managed to dilute it - and the current lot would like nothing more than to privitise it - but knows they can't explicitly do that. They believe in privisation, even when it makes no sense (The recent big success story on the UK rail network - the one where customer satisfaction was particularly high and everything was mostly on time and running well was one of the publicly owned part - to a couple of firms that have little or no customer satisfaction and don't run on time. They'll probably actually end up costing the Government in subsidies where they were making them money)

As it is, the buildings don't typically belong to the hospitals in question - a previous Government set up PFI (Where a third party gets the building built and then that particular hospital pays rent) on hospitals and the last lot (That were partly the current lot and partly the lib dems) said that this was terribly inefficient (It is - it costs far, far more for the hospital in question) and then continued with the deals, regardless.

Who is the "government" anyway? Government is people.

Yes, we're all in this together. Except when there are some laws for MPs and some laws for everybody else. (The 2 main ones I'm thinking of are that the MPs have double the pension allowance of everybody else (I know, potentially, they may only be in power for a short period of time but - really) and the Wilson doctorate. (MPs communication is protected - because there may be whistleblowers. Except that only works on the MPs. What if somebody wanted to whistleblow on an MP? Only the MP is protected, not the source. If the MP is *okay* with the person being traced...)

That phrase is what brought us Marxism, communism, and socialism.

And is socialism so bad and terrible? No system is perfect. You need bits and pieces of all of them to work properly.

Let's assume we have a society that everyone gets what they need, and everyone provides to their ability, who enforces that? Who decides what people need and another can provide Usually the answer is that the government does. Which means that phrase translates to, "the government takes and the government gives."

Indeed. But where we're on a planet where a very small number of people have the same total wealth as half of the planet, would taking more money from that very small number of people be a bad thing? What are they going to do with it anyway?

To me a "fundamental right" means the government cannot interfere. A "fundamental right" to healthcare

What good is fast internet?

[Opportunist]

What good is a speed increase if I am not allowed to use it for what I want? I sure as fuck don't need faster internet to get more ads that I must not block. I sure don't need faster access of pages that don't interest me because the ISPs may throttle those that do with impunity.

Most of all, I do not need faster access. I need more secure access. Which you buffoons actually want to outlaw.

Don't dip the turd you try to feed us in chocolate and pretend like it's tasty.

Rights

[frnic]

Unless you believe in God given rights, every right is simply something the government guarantees to you.

Society over time decides what it feels everyone should be entitled to - and entitled is not a four letter word.

We started with Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Since then we added a few, everyone can vote, everyone can work, speech, etc.

As society changes more things become "rights" - ie. things we as a society feel all of us would benefit by having - like education, healthcare, living wage.

The internet is widely integrated into all walks of life in all industrialized nations. I won't list the benefits it brings, since Anonymous Cowards want to prove that dial up is "good enough" and you can live without it even.

The point is, rights are not about things you can't live without, rights are about those things we as a society believe everyone should have.

Entitlement

[BradMajors]

Not a right, an entitlement. A right is something the government can not stop you from doing. An entitlement is something the government must provide you. The distinction is important. Governments do not provide anyone with rights. Governments can only take rights away.

Re:A right does not obligate anyone to act

[Kjella]

A recent debate is that medical care is a "fundamental right". So I find myself in need of medical care, does that obligate the government to provide it? Who is the "government" anyway? Government is people. Do I have the right to another person's labor? Are other people obligated to provide me with their resources? That is what things like food, shelter, internet access, and medical care are, they are the time, labor, and resources of others.

I don't have a "fundamental right" to another person's stuff. Claiming such sounds a lot like, "to everyone according to their needs, from everyone according to their abilities." I'd bet that a lot of people don't even know where that phrase comes from or what it means. That phrase is what brought us Marxism, communism, and socialism.

Negative right = the government will not interfere. Positive right = the government will secure your right. If you're absolutely against positive rights, you're against many fundamental rights like the rule of law. If we can raise taxes for police, lawyers og judges to keep you from being murdered, why can't we raise taxes to keep you from starving, thirsting, freezing to death or dying for trivially cured injuries or disease? What you're rebelling against isn't socialism, it's civilization and democracy. It doesn't have to be pinko commie land, you didn't opt in to US law. You didn't opt in to the US tax code. They're part of society and you want out, a place where the government takes nothing "by force" even though it has public consent is a place with no government at all.

I have a right to free speech, does that mean the government must provide me with time on a radio station? I have the right to travel freely, does that obligate the government to buy me a car?

If there was no public roads, your "right to travel freely" would end at the end of your driveway. From there on out it would be a private conglomerate of road owners subject to their terms and conditions for use. Oh and for bonus points they'd also control any water and sewage pipes, electricity, phone, coax or fiber lines going in or out of your city block. What effectively lets you travel is that there's a whole lot of land that's a little bit yours - public property, provided and maintained by the government. If you want to write a letter to your Congressman the US postal service is compelled to deliver it. The phone service is a common carrier and can't refuse to connect you.

Those aren't rights though, they're services provided on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis - and in some cases even subsidized - to provide opportunities to exercise those rights. And they're not free, you still have to pay postage and phone bills and get your own car - unless you take public transport that is also not free. Are they interfering in a free market? Absolutely. The postage clearly doesn't accurately reflect the actual geographic costs of sending mail, that is by design. How you manage to twist that into subsidies becoming propaganda tools? The postal service doesn't bill by the content, nor does the phone company and the electricity company doesn't ask what you plugged in. By your logic, we have to shut down the public roads because they encourage driving over flying.