Earlier today I was browsing conversation threads on TED.com when the following subject caught my eye. “How we can use social media on a world scale to launch a global campaign to recognize Internet access as a basic human right?”

My initial response was, “Excuse me. Could you repeat that please.”. As I read through the thread, I was able to put the idea into context. This allowed me to give a bit more constructive thought to the question.

The idea is to enshrine Internet access in the U.N.Charter of Universal Rights. That seems harmless enough since nobody enforces that thing anyway. But let’s consider for a moment why that’s supposed to be a good thing.

If you are reading this, it’s a pretty safe bet that you already have internet access (and some spare time). You have the luxury of tapping into mind-bogglingly huge amounts of stuff. There are the writings of great thinkers, practical “how-to”s for almost anything, random Blogs by people you’ve never heard of (Hello I’m Win. Nice to meet you.), and a universe of other stuff. There are also the communication aspects of it. How great would it be if a doctor in a rural village in Ghana could get a realtime consult with a pediatrician in New York? What if a teacher in Kosovo could give their students a live connection to classrooms around the world to share and learn in a global context? Who knows what changes might come from such democratization of access and communication?

Which is what I want to know. Who can predict those changes. Obviously, those who want to lobby for this right believe they know the outcome. The fact is, people are notoriously lousy at predicting the impact of their actions. Even more so when personal beliefs or emotional attachments are at stake. It’s nice to think of a doctor in New York helping the doctor in Ghana save a child’s life. It’s not so nice to think about Al Shabab using the collaborative power of the internet to unify and better manage their operations allowing them to vastly increase the suffering in Somalia.

We all tend to focus on our own desired outcome. It is immensely difficult for us to honestly look at other options. We don’t want to acknowledge that there are as many opportunities for abuse as for use. That just because we have this thing does not mean that it is good for everyone else, or for us. Even those who have been exposed to the internet since it’s public inception struggle with the existence of this ethical and moral void in our midst.

The internet is not a discreet entity. It had no ethics or morality beyond those of it’s creators. There are technologies which allow people, organizations or governments to block undesirable content. There are also technologies to bypass those blocks. Censorship, whatever it’s motive, is at best a stopgap solution. In our society, we have had a process of of information exposure and even we are suffering “information overload”. How much more devastating the potential impact of the internet on a community without so much as a TV. What of the erosion of that culture by exposure to every other cultural expression in the world?

Would universal internet access be a blessing, or the single greatest act of cultural colonization since the Romans, the British or the Catholic Church?

Only time (and an unlikely transfer of technology) will tell.

Cheers, Winston