From Sam Edge, Ringwood, Hampshire, UK\n <\/p>\n
I understand Merten Reglitz\u2019s argument that internet access should become a human right. However, spending the best part of half a trillion dollars on this wouldn\u2019t automatically give people access to clean water, enough food, basic healthcare or the means to make a decent living to pay for these things, which they might consider a higher priority(23 August, p 20<\/a>).<\/p>\n A right to free internet would probably have to include the right to a reasonably up-to-date device and access to free electricity to power it, not to mention training. That is going to cost at least an order of magnitude more.<\/p>\n A more effective idea might be some form of right to a universal basic income. There is a lot of evidence that the rest \u2013 including internet access \u2013 would follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From Sam Edge, Ringwood, Hampshire, UK I understand Merten Reglitz\u2019s argument that internet access should become a human…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150835,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[49,48,244,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-150834","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-internet","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150834\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}