Chapter 2 - The Emergence of Human Rights Online
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2021
Summary
INTRODUCTION
By early 2011, the Internet was in the midst of massive growth. New technologies were rapidly developing, as open Internet standards and protocols proliferated, and access increased from millions to billions of people. Like many others, activists reached for new Internet-based technologies to find each other, organise, and use the new tools in their work. They quickly saw the potential to use the Internet for highlighting human rights abuses, and creating and sharing news stories that mainstream media would not publish. The daily increase in Internet connectivity, and the creation and uploading of online content, saw offline struggles for human rights increasingly taken into online spaces, raising fundamental questions about whether human rights were relevant to the Internet and, if so, how. Many of the ways in which activists were using the Internet, and government responses to these, were challenging fundamental ideas about human rights.
THE PROMISE OF THE INTERNET
The Internet was often described as a kind of ‘wild, wild West’: a place where there were no laws and everyone was free to do as they pleased. But I have never liked that phrase. It connotes some kind of uncontrolled colonial expansion, evoking inglorious histories of unprincipled exploitation of people and land, or the claiming of property, simply because someone considered they were ‘there for the taking’, without recognising the multiple rights and interests of others. It evokes images of a ‘gold rush’ mentality.
I prefer to liken the expansion of the Internet to the early stages of the universe's evolution: the ’Big Bang‘: a time of formation, of creation of new and rapidly expanding stars and galaxies, spectacular dark holes, wondrous universes, and planets where all kinds of life began to flourish in different ecosystems. The Big Bang, in this case, was the emergence of the formative infrastructure needed to support Internet roll-out at different layers of the protocol stack, such as the rapid movement from telephone dial-up, and then to broadband connectivity and agreements to lay new undersea cables to connect continents.
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- Human Rights and the Internet , pp. 29 - 46Publisher: IntersentiaPrint publication year: 2021