A Right?

Is the internet becoming a human right?

By Jan Chipchase – Special to CNN

We’re halfway done with 2011, a year marked by remarkable, revolutionary uprisings in the Middle East – uprisings facilitated and documented on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.

When the governments in Egypt and Syria tried to control the flow of information from citizens by blocking Internet access and other forms of communication, the worldwide perception of these acts was that they were sinister and cruel. People were silenced. It was as if their vocal chords were cut; it was as if we, outside the Middle East, were blinded.

Was the impact so dramatic because today Internet access has reached the status of a basic need – like clean water or electricity?

The United Nations, in fact, recently declared that disconnecting people from the Internet is a violation of human rights. And if connectivity is a human right, how do we help make the Internet more accessible to everyone – from those in the throes of a revolution, to fellow citizens back home? What is our responsibility to bridge the digital divide?The World Bank’s international infrastructure statistics provide a snapshot of how the human need for Internet connectivity keeps growing exponentially. In the early 1990s, according to the Bank, there were 0.3 Internet users for every 100 people. Today, that figure is 27.1 per 100.