In the land of broadband connections, the Wi-Fi man is king. Or so the saying goes.

Since the early years of the 21st century, the advent of the Internet and the dawn of the information age have revolutionised the way people do everything, from retail to connecting with their loved ones.

However, the shift has been decidedly lopsided, with the technological revolution bearing fruit largely in the West, and developing nations trailing behind download screens and patchy connections.

In recent years, there has been a push from the civil society and tech groups to include access to the Internet as a basic civil and human right guaranteed to citizens by governments across the world. As of 2013, only 2.7 billion people on the planet had regular access to the Internet.

“The Internet is an enabler; it’s a resource that can enable people to live a full life,” says Muchuki Mwangi, senior development manager for Africa and Middle East at the Internet Society, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to proliferate global online access. “Having Internet access improves the chances of enhancing human rights far more than without it.”

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) estimates that only 16 per cent of Africans use the Internet regularly, compared with 75 per cent of Europeans.

Nigeria and Egypt remain the most connected countries on the continent, while Burundi and Eritrea trail the pack with only 1.2 and .08 per cent of residents having access to the web respectively.

The theory of universal access, sometimes called the right to broadband, purports that reliable online access is synonymous with freedom of expression and opinion, which are indeed basic human rights, at least if you follow the ones prescribed by the United Nations.

Nations like Costa Rica, Finland, Greece, Spain and France have all introduced legislature to ensure that Internet access is available across the country and that it is not subject to government restriction. In 2000, the government of Estonia argued that the Internet was essential to life in the 21st Century.

But with millions across the world still struggling with basic amenities like clean water and formal housing, can access to the Internet ever really hold up as a universal human right? Will say Red Cross trucks one day hand out SIM cards in aid packages with just enough data to get refugees through the week?

In August, Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the formation of a new global partnership called Internet.org with the goal of increasing online access in rural and developing areas across the world.

“For nine years, we’ve been on a mission to connect the world,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post following the original announcement. “We now connect more than one billion people, but to connect the next five billion we must solve a much bigger problem: The vast majority of people don’t have access to the Internet.”

Connecting the world

Facebook is the world’s largest online social network and connects 1.15 billion people across the world every month; about one seventh of the world’s total population.

Half a dozen other tech giants including Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung partnered on the initiative which said it will develop joint projects, share knowledge and mobilise industry and governments to bring the web to what they called “the next five billion people.”

“Global Internet and social media access represent the biggest shift since the industrial evolution, and we want to make it all-inclusive,” said MK Tsai, chairman of MediaTek, in a press release.

The idea was to rethink mobile Internet technology by making access cheaper and more efficient for developing nations who make use of pre-paid mobile data on SIM cards rather than fixed broadband connections.

By compressing data and optimising application and battery efficiency, the group said they could increase the scope of access; in essence, if people use less data performing the same actions, they’ll be able to connect more often and for less money.

Reception to Internet.org from the online community was mixed. Zuckerberg’s original announcement garnered close to 100,000 “Likes” within the first few days while Facebook users flocked to the CEO’s personal page, some with comments of support, others showing a little less optimism.

“Maybe you should take all that [cash] you’re making and connect those five billion people to clean drinking water and a reliable food source,” wrote US resident Josh Fleming. “When you are alive, healthy and happy, you tend to ‘Like’ things more.”

Similar programmes like Google’s Project Loon, which seeks to connect rural areas to the web with high-altitude balloons, have also garnered harsh criticisms.

Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has been highly critical of the programme, telling Inside Investor in August that, “When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you. When a kid gets diarrhoea, no, there’s no website that relieves that.”

Zuckerberg defended his position by pointing out that in many developed nations, the Internet accounts for a larger portion of the total GDP than agriculture and energy. He also cited a global increase in jobs created by the World Wide Web as well as the tech industry.

Tim Katlic, founder of Online Africa, echoes his sentiments but sees a bigger picture.

“Boosting the Internet does add immediate jobs; someone has to sell these prepaid cards and it also adds ICT skills training job,” says Katlic. “But I think the greater benefit is how it ties back to human rights, freedom of expression and people learning more about the world around them. It can make people feel empowered to become entrepreneurs.”

Besides the immediate economic effect on jobs and GDP, Mwangi describes the Internet’s rippling result on the commercial sector as a knock-on effect.

“When there’s an easy opportunity for people to transact business online, it means I’m going to make savings; my time is well spent with me being able to do more in a day,” he says. “Then it means I can take that resource, the revenue and time lost in transit, and put it towards something more constructive like investing in real estate or the stockmarket.”

Universal access

Another major component of the universal access push has less to do with making sure people can check their emails and more with passing legislation to limit a government’s ability to censor available content.

The Golden Shield Project, or more popularly known as The Great Firewall of China, is a system of censorship and public surveillance initiated by the government of China in 2003. Through it, the Ministry of Public Security can track all information coming in and out of the country via the web.

This also allows the government to filter out undesirable content that could threaten the state’s stability. Searching for information on something inflammatory, like, for example, the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, could yield significantly different results if requested from inside the borders of China.

The Chinese government also outrightly blocks a host of popular social media sites such as Twitter, Blogspot, Wordpress, YouTube, Google+ and, of course, Facebook.

“It’s not that the Internet itself is a human right, but more that technology enables rights like freedom of expression,” says Katlic. “It’s really become a fabric of life and a key component to all kinds of civil rights. It’s very powerful that citizens can start to hold governments more accountable and not fear that their voices won’t be heard.”

Others have cited events like the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 as further proof that mobile Internet devices and social media have their place in the future of global politics and citizen engagement.

During the Egyptian revolution which saw the ousting of longtime President Hosni Mubarak, government officials shut down 93 per cent of the country’s Internet connections in order to curb or attempt to subdue the unrest which was being organised primarily via social media.

In mid-March, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan effectively banned Twitter in the country, citing concerns of state security amid demonstrations.

Ultimately, proponents of global access argue that although the Internet isn’t essential for life, its ability to enable and enhance the organisation of everything from commerce to social movements make it an amenity necessary for a certain quality of life in the modern age.

“If you think about what the Internet is capable of doing and the definition of what a human right is, it will always be a contentious issue,” Mwangi adds.

“The Internet is an enabler, it can enable the enhancement of human life, the improvement of human rights and I think this is something that will be discussed in different platforms in the years to come.”