{"id":69969,"date":"2025-09-17T17:29:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-17T17:29:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/69969\/"},"modified":"2025-09-17T17:29:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-17T17:29:06","slug":"letter-right-to-free-internet-may-cost-more-than-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/69969\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter: Right to free internet may cost more than thought"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>                                                                        From Sam Edge, Ringwood, Hampshire, UK\n                            <\/p>\n<p>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(<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg26735571-600-we-need-to-establish-free-internet-access-as-a-standalone-human-right\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">23 August, p 20<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>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<p>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&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[18,19,285,17,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-69969","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-internet","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}