In today's world, internet access has become an integral part of our existence as almost everything we do revolves around it, starting from our personal life down to our educational life and even global communication.
I know there are lots of punishments in life that could be brutal, especially considering the impacts they leave on our physical body. But then, there is another punishment that stands on a whole different level and that is no other punishment other than having an active data subscription, yet not being able to use of it.
It's not uncommon to hear people making extra plans for network access when they're travelling to the village and other rural areas, not because of the cost of data subscription but because they don't know the one that will be available in their new resident just to minimise the number of trees they will have to climb, lol.
Personally, when I was going to the village, I went with all the networks in Nigeria, I had all my SIM cards (Airtel, 9Mobile, Glo and MTN) and was earnestly praying one of them works atleast.
On today's episode of Hivelearners prompt, we were asked whether internet access should be considered a fundamental human right. Now, let's get this right....
Fundamental Human rights are basic universal freedoms not privileges every human being should enjoy irrespective of age, sex, tribe e.t.c
An example of this is the right to life, right to freedom of movement and many others.
One common thing that comes with these fundamental human rights is that most of them inherently comes with us and nature,for instance , we were born(life), we have mouth to speak(right to speech), we have our legs to walk around( right of movement) but coming to internet access, it is really not so.
No doubt, making internet access a human right will help foster other human rights such as, the freedom of speech and information allowing people voice out their opinion and have access to information they need, but then, making internet access a right for everyone leaves behind some blurry areas to it's implementation.
Who Will Provide It?
Will the government be forced to make this provision, or will the different private networking companies be forced to cut down their prices to be affordable? And even if they agree to do this, what is affordable? Because what might be affordable for Mr. A might not be affordable for Mr. B
Let's say the ruling is passed, the world will take a different turn obviously, both positively and negatively.
Positively in the sense that the governments will be forced to invest in developing all the rural areas with little or no network connectivity hence, fostering progress and development.
Negatively, in the sense that we automatically depends at the mercy of the government, they dictate how we should use it and might possibly restrict the network from accessing some websites even when those websites will be beneficial to us.
Is it something that we can live with in the long run?
Everything is possible they say but personally for this topic, I really do not know but a greater percentage of me feels it's not feasible.
Obviously every development comes with its own unique challenges but finding a way to make network access perfectly accessible all the time will really be a great addition to the human race, nah, to Nigerians and few others.
You gerrit?
Thanks for reading and have a nice day 👍