Universal Access Policies and Internet Access as a Fundamental Right: The Constitutional Law Perspective Informed by the Brazilian Case

The need for digital inclusion and the idea of universal access strongly informed the debates at the first World Summit for the Information Society back in 2003. But to say that such aspect of the information society has been the main preoccupation of the stakeholders all through the four Internet Governance Forums so far is arguably exaggerated. Digital inclusion has in fact been relegated to a secondary level of importance in the general worldwide internet governance debate. There are already two billion people surfing the web and most developed countries have very high levels of internet penetration. Even developing countries such as Brazil and China have reasonable and rising internet penetration levels. Even when discussing the so-called “digital divide”, we are no longer worried with internet access plain and simple but rather with broadband penetration. There’s well-spread consensus among people that internet access is indispensable in our day-to-day lives and yet some take for granted the efforts needed to effectively guarantee it for people in developing countries. Even if we could “declare the war won” (COMPAINE, 2001) in rich nations, there’s indeed a long way yet to go before poorer nations achieve reasonable levels of internet penetration coupled with information literacy in order to grant their citizens a ticket into the information society. The concept of a fundamental right to internet access and the role that governments of democratic constitutional states must play in fulfilling it, along with proper judicial enforcement of such fulfillment, is what concerns our research. It is therefore an investigation of the constitutional law perspective of digital inclusion.