True freedom is about fair access to the Internet

May 08, 2011

HE put it well when he said that Internet freedom is a basic human right. Indeed, the internet has become a necessary conduit for people to express themselves.

By Stephen Ssenkaaba

HE put it well when he said that Internet freedom is a basic human right. Indeed, the internet has become a necessary conduit for people to express themselves.

But Jerry P. Lanier, the American ambassador to Uganda left many unanswered questions in his article: “Internet freedom is a basic human right (New Vision, April 7, 2011).

The Internet with all its possibilities cannot be accessed by a large number of people. In developing economies, poor infrastructure, excessively high tariffs, and prohibitive prices for Internet services, mean that ever fewer people can use this medium to innovate, connect and share ideas. According to Internet World Stats, an international website on world internet usage, as of last year, Internet penetration in Africa stood at 10.9%, compared to North America’s 77.4% and Europe’s 58.4%.

Only 957,000 out of 33 million Ugandans use the Internet. The same Internet that acts as a platform for people to express their ideas to innovate and connect also sets stringent limits through which end users can enjoy these rights. Intellectual property laws and other digital codes bar people from freely exploring the internet.

Today Internet usage plays out in an unbalanced environment where the world’s powerful economies in the West hold undue influence over the way that this medium is used and distributed to the rest of the world. For over 10 years now the US exercised considerable authority on internet policy through the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a not-for profit organisation mandated to regulate Internet usage. Through this body, America has held sway over the single-root Internet Domain Name System (DNS) and determined the number of Internet domains necessary to provide services and beneficiaries of user demand for registration services in the most profitable domains.

As such, the ability to determine the use and benefit from internet domains has largely depended on the business interests of powerful countries like America. Lower income countries like Uganda would therefore not be a priority in appropriation of internet services, partly because of their inability to meet the profit projections of the powerful industrial nations.

Much of the policies that were charted out at the two World Summits on the Information Society in Geneva (2003) and Tunisia (2005) still left many developing countries at the bottom of the information superhighway chain.

Can ordinary people have an equal chance to connect, innovate and express themselves in the “global town square” in the face of such inequalities? Hardly. As we worry about Government obstruction of the Internet, let us also think about equitable sharing of Internet and other new media technologies.

The need for the Government to respect people’s freedom to connect to the Internet will become even more important when more people have equal access to the Internet. The global North has a leading role in championing this cause.

Indeed, as Lanier observes, true freedom is not just about citizens criticising their governments, it is, as one scholar says, about “letting individuals have a fair opportunity to participate in meaning-making that constitute them as individuals.

To quote J.M Balkin, a constitutional law professor, “speech becomes democratised because technologies of innovation are available to a wider range of people.

The writer is a journalist


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