[Air-l] rights of access to the Internet

[William Bain]

Hello All,
   
  I'd like to send a question related to what Erick Iriarte Ahon (for Alfa-Redi) writes on the way the complex context of the (new) technologies appears to generate at least two questions, namely, whether there exists a right to access the Internet as an instrument to access information and whether there exists an obligation on the part of governments to offer such access in a general (universal) way. (I'm translating from his recent AIR-L contribution in Spanish: "En un contexto de evolucion permanente en el cual las tecnologias van hacia la convergencia, y los procesos sociales ncrementan el uso cotidiano de las TICs; en donde las politicas de TICs han logrado evolucionar a componentes de TICpD en las Pol?ticas de Desarrollo, y en el cual la brecha social se amplia en su componente digital (lease brecha digital), la pregunta que surge es: ?existe un derecho de acceder a internet como instrumento para acceder a la informacion?, y por ende ?existe una obligacion por parte
 de los gobiernos de brindar este acceso de manera universal?").
   
  I hesitated as to whether to send my query directly to Alfa-Redi or here and finally decided on the second option. This comment involves a recent example I found of a relatively new technology, the Power Point presentation, in this case, used in conjunction with sending information to the mainstream press and to nongovernmental (perhaps paragovernmental) organizations. What I'm referring to is an article by Matthew Kalman in the _San Francisco Chronicle_ of 21 July 2006. The title of the article is enough I think to suggest the complexity of the situation: "Israel set war plan more than a year ago". In it, Kalman notes that the presentation his article refers to set out their policy in Lebanon at the present moment. The article can be retrieved by going to the _Chronicle_ website and searching by Kalman's full name or, directly, at:
  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/21/MNG2QK396D1.DTL&hw=matthew+kalman&sn=002&sc=339

My main question is this: the presentation the article speaks of was on precisely what the title says, "setting out the plan for the current operation [in Lebanon] in revealing detail," in the author's words. But while it was a Power Point talk given to journalists and others in positions of some authority, it seems to me that the main question is: what would happen if the presentation had been done via the Internet?
   
  Thanks to Erick Iriarte Ahon and Alfa-Redi for their project,
   
  William


William Bain
PhD Student
Comparative Literature
Department of Spanish Philology
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
 			
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