The creation of the World Wide Web, better known as the internet, has radically changed humanity over the past 30 years. Since then, various social processes have been transformed to the extent that there are entire generations that have lost ties with the immediate past and do not conceive of the “disconnected” world. In 1990 only 0.25% of the world’s population had access to the internet; last year almost six out of ten people connected to the network.
In Latin America the connection rate is even higher. In 2020, 67% of Latin Americans had access to the internet; Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Mexico were the countries with the highest number of users. In a very short time the internet ceased to be a instrument comparable to radio, film or television and became the virtual space The Cyberspace, like a doubling of the real space.
A large part of the world’s population has moved their activities to cyberspace thanks to the creation of applications. According to the report We Are SocialFrom Hootsuite 2020, almost half of the world’s population interacts on the internet through a digital social network every day. In Latin America the average is 65%, with Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil leading the way, well above the world average.
Electronic commerce has changed consumer habits: last year it represented 4.4% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP). In contrast, according to data from the 2018 Latinobarometer, only one in four Latin Americans made purchases online or would be willing to do so. These same data showed that electronic commerce has the highest penetration in countries with the highest GDP per capita, with the highest number of Internet users and the best human development index, such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica and Colombia.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic intensified the use of the internet and its applications and accelerated some processes that were in transition, such as teleworking and online education, but did not have a significant impact on electronic commerce. According to the report “Shock covid-19: a boost to reinforce commercial resilience after the pandemic”, by the Inter-American Development Bank, the exports of the countries of the region fell by -12%, a contraction significantly greater than the global one. Despite the sustained growth of electronic commerce year after year, its share in regional GDP barely reached 2% in 2020.
Cyberspace as a doubling of public space
Cyberspace opened as a zone of emancipation from the public space dominated by politics, but in a short time it has been subjected to various forces: market competition, private morality, and state control. What are its limits? The internet is a service offered by private companies but its use is public, which makes cyberspace practically a common good. It is within the reach of ordinary people, governments and public and private institutions, and in recent years the “traditional media” of communication have moved there.
Cyberspace is no longer simply another means of communication, but is literally becoming the space that competes or even replaces the everyday public space. Market relations dominate cyberspace and, if the State intervenes, this happens not as an interference but as a necessity so that people are not left unprotected.
Cyberspace creates situations, not so hypothetical, in which the law of the strongest predominates, that is, behaviors driven by passions rather than reason. And this is probably the biggest justification for the need for digital rights.
New rights for a new (virtual) reality
People’s rights have arisen from historical-social conjunctures that promote them and accelerate their incorporation into the existing rights system, such as political and economic revolutions. Rights can disappear, be replaced by others or create completely new ones, such as digital rights.
Digital rights should be thought of as a way to enhance existing rights, not to limit or cancel them.
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Now, the transformations of the last decades derived from the “technophysian” evolution, a term developed by Dora Costa and William Fogel, and the revolution in new technologies that developed in the exceptional twentieth century force us to think about digital rights from a perspective different and can be classified into three large groups.
In the first place, “non-translatable” rights are rights that already exist in all spaces and are “stretched” into cyberspace, preserving their essence. Examples are the rights of justice and restorative justice, the protection of minors, the political rights of freedom, equality, association and non-discrimination.
The “translated rights” derive from existing rights, but require moving to cyberspace. For example, the protection of personal data, the restoration of moral damage, the digital will, freedom of consumption, the quality of online education, the quality of services provided by private and public sector, and the rights of author, among others.
Properly digital rights, of “new creation”, require a new language: free, equal and secure access to the Internet, which for some should be a human right; the right to privacy and intimacy, such as limits to geolocation; the right to be forgotten in virtual space; the right to disconnect, a labor right that it is urgent to implement; the right to non-obsolescence and portability, because otherwise digital gaps are generated; the right to net neutrality, that is, non-interference with political positions; and above all, the right to the truth, as a way to combat misinformation, called infodemic, and post-truth.
In several countries some of these rights have been slowly incorporated; in some others the pandemic is driving their need. In Mexico, in December 2020 labor legislation was modified to regulate teleworking and recognize the right to disconnect. In Argentina and Brazil, telephony and Internet access were declared “essential services”. But also the lack of regulation allowed, in a justified but dangerous way, to use geolocation to identify cases of contagion, as in Brazil and Mexico.
Spain is probably one of the Latin American countries that have advanced the most in digital rights. Beyond the criticism for the little discussion when the Organic Law on Data Protection was approved in Congress and in the Senate in 2018, it is a pioneering law in the global context and that includes many of the aforementioned rights.
There is still much to do, but digital rights must be conceived from the principles of human freedom and equality. In their discussion there is a tendency to formulate supposed principles derived from private morality and political correctness, confusing rights with prohibitions, and this logic spreads across the Internet like a computer virus.
Banning can solve problems, but it doesn’t create a better society. For this reason, digital rights should be thought of as a way to enhance existing rights, not to limit or cancel them.
Fernando Barrientos is a political scientist and professor at the University of Guanajuato. This article was originally published on www.latinoamerica21.com
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