Can checking your e-mail really be a human right? Carphone Warehouse hopes so. After the Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson, announced his plans to disconnect persistent internet pirates last week, the owner of Britain’s largest internet service provider, TalkTalk, threatened him with legal action under human rights legislation.Sounding more like the campaigns manager from Amnesty International than an executive with an internet provider, Andrew Heaney stoked fears of a “kangaroo court” that would lead to “wrongful accusations” and render internet users “guilty until proven innocent”.The idea is not entirely fanciful. The European Parliament in Strasbourg is currently working out an agreement on how its member states should deal with illegal file-sharing. It has already made clear that it sees internet access as “critical for the practical exercise of a wide array of fundamental rights” and is working on a piece of legislation that could render attempts to restrict internet use subject to the European Convention on Human Rights.You can see where the legislators are coming from. It wasn’t long ago that the net was an office novelty, useful for a little browsing and the playful pinging of e-mail.In 2000, less than 10 per cent of the population considered internet access a necessity, according to a survey by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. But by 2009, the consensus was that for families with children, it had become one.The basics of human existence, after all, are prone to change as societies get richer and more sophisticated; just as it’s difficult for us to imagine how people got by without washing machines, in a world where everything from job ads to dating is migrating online, it’s hard for many of us now to imagine life before the net.In large part, that’s because of its ubiquity. In the late 1990s, the internet was available only via creaky, screechy dial-up modems. When we did manage to get through, we wanted little more than to check our e-mail and get out as soon as we could. Thanks to our wireless hotspots, BlackBerrys and iPhones, however, cyberspace is now as freely available as running water.The analogy is a good one. Turn off our supply and we’re likely to get shirty if we haven’t logged in for a while. Turn it up and the pressure of the stream of online information can be breathtaking. When we sit down to check our e-mail after a long absence, many of us instinctively hold our breath as if we had just dived underwater.The threat of disconnection from the net, if it was made real, would certainly concentrate the mind. Three quarters of British young people aged between 16 and 24, according to a YouthNet survey published last month, say that they couldn’t live without internet access. There’s no doubt, either, of the scale of the problem with piracy. The British Phonographic Industry reckons that there are six million active file-sharers in the UK — all of whom, under Lord Mandelson’s flotilla of antipiracy measures, are going to be threatened with warning letters and eventual disconnection.The internet service providers, who have been press-ganged into being both snitch and policeman under the new system, are understandably rolling their eyes. They well know that the internet is a high-tech cockroach, a busy thoroughfare in which it is almost impossible to stop the traffic whizzing by.The hotchpotch of bedfellows who gave it life — hippies, computer hobbyists and computer scientists — were suspicious of authority of any kind, and put together a system of interlinked computers that excelled in its ability to route around the influence of the authorities and put ordinary people in touch with one another.When the original music file-sharing service Napster was sued out of existence by a California judge for theft of copyright in 2001, for example, some of the millions of teenagers and young people who had fallen in love with it discovered that, if people didn’t work from a centrally managed list of music and instead hooked up their internet connections to one other directly, it would be much harder for the authorities to catch them. Quietly and apparently spontaneously, a new generation of so-called file-sharing systems sprang up to let people swap music without any need for a central server.These new file-sharing systems — Kazaa, Limewire and BitTorrent — became known as “peer-to-peer” operations, meaning that they put ordinary users or peers together with each other without the need for a central chaperone. Since they acted not as managers of a central list but only as electronic matchmakers putting users in touch with one another, they were much harder fish to catch.Now that they in turn are coming under pressure from Lord Mandelson, there is evidence that file-sharing is migrating to new waters, using e-mail and instant-messaging to give authorities the slip. For a small fee, too, savvy internet users will be able to purchase a proxy which means that their illicit file-sharing will be almost impossible to trace.The best way to view internet access is, again, as a utility akin to running water. Stroll through Central London with an iPhone or a laptop and you can leech seamless access to the net via those who have been generous enough not to attach a password to their wireless connection. Only two weeks ago, when my wireless broadband ground to a halt, did I discover that it was being surreptitiously shared by 12 of my immediate neighbours, all of whose names duly popped up on my computer when I went to investigate.There’s a good argument that, just like the water companies, internet service providers shouldn’t be allowed to cut us off even if we don’t mind our manners or pay our fair share, but internet service providers are being more than a little disingenuous when they pass themselves off as human rights activists. They are going to have their work cut out under Lord Mandelson’s proposed system and they know it.After all, if many of us are borrowing from an indivisible cloud of wireless ether, how do we know who’s the thief? And how do we disconnect internet thieves when they can simply pluck internet access from the air?If Mandelson’s penal system for internet piracy is going to work, it’s going to be hugely costly, and internet service providers are going to end up footing much of the bill. BT and Carphone Warehouse estimate that running it would cost about £2 per broadband line per month — a total of £420 million a year.But even if it was possible to isolate the freeloaders and remove their online supply, it wouldn't make much sense to see it as an infringement of their human rights. To do so confuses people’s access to tools and resources with the proper stuff of human rights — our freedom to vote, organise and express ourselves.Western press coverage of the recent pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran obsessed about the fact that a few of them were using Twitter to get their message out to the wider world. Despite the fickle enthusiasm of the Western media, however, it would be hugely insulting to the demonstrators to imagine that they were fighting for their right to Tweet.Online is now approaching a basic human need, but only mischievous legal reasoning and blinkered internet gee-whizzery would make what we do on the net into a human right. It is much more interesting than that.Source: Times Online