Is the Internet a fundamental right in Haiti? We want to hear you!

In a study realized by BBC almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right.

The survey - of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries, but not from Haiti - found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide.

Countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens. International bodies such as the UN are also pushing for universal net access.

"The right to communicate cannot be ignored," Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), told BBC News. "The internet is the most powerful potential source of enlightenment ever created." He said that governments must "regard the internet as basic infrastructure - just like roads, waste and water". "We have entered the knowledge society and everyone must have access to participate."

The survey also revealed divisions on the question of government oversight of some aspects of the net. Web users questioned in South Korea and Nigeria felt strongly that governments should never be involved in regulation of the internet. However, a majority of those in China and the many European countries disagreed. In the UK, for example, 55% believed that there was a case for some government regulation of the internet.

The BBC survey found that 87% of internet users felt internet access should be the "fundamental right of all people". More than 70% of non-users felt that they should have access to the net. Overall, almost 79% of those questioned said they either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with the description of the internet as a fundamental right - whether they currently had access or not. Countries such as Mexico, Brazil and Turkey most strongly support the idea of net access as a right, the survey found. More than 90% of those surveyed in Turkey, for example, stated that internet access is a fundamental right - more than those in any other European Country.

Haitians, friend of Haiti, we want to hear your comments:

is the Internet a fundamental right in Haiti?

At Multilink, we think that "Like water and electricity, the Internet is essential to the quality of life of people as well as to the success of businesses".

Read the complete article from BBC here

A special report from "The Economist" on telecoms in emerging markets

Countries like Haiti have already benefited hugely from mobile phones. Mobile-phone access will soon be almost universal. The next task is to do the same for the Internet.

The reason why mobile phones are so valuable to people in the emerging world is that they are providing access to telecommunications for the very first time, rather than just being portable adjuncts to existing fixed-line phones, as in the rich world. For an American or a Canadian it was incremental. In Haiti it’s revolutionary. According to a recent study, adding an extra ten mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts growth in GDP per person by 0.8 percentage points.

In 2000 the developing countries accounted for around one-quarter of the world’s 700 million or so mobile phones. By the beginning of 2009 their share had grown to three-quarters of a total of about 3.6 billion mobile phone users.

At current rates of growth it seems likely that within five years, and certainly within ten, everyone in the world who wants a mobile phone will probably have one. High-speed networks will be widespread in about every countries.

The next task is to ensure that everyone who wants to can use mobile technology to access the Internet. This will be done using low-cost laptops, or netbooks, connecting to the Internet via mobile networks. There could be 1.4 billion mobile-broadband subscribers by 2014.

Internet will be the highway of the masses!

To read the complete article in Economist.com click on this link

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