Which parts of the Internet are a right or a luxury?

Kat Dixon is a research fellow with the Data Poverty Lab. Over 3 months, she’s investigating community-led initiatives which get people facing data poverty good access to the Internet. These blog posts track her journey and thinking.

Week 1 is done and my virtual wall is exploding with colourful post-its. So many great initiatives, so little time.

But what’s preoccupying me most is the question of limited access and rights. If you’re poor, who gets to decide what access you have? Is the Internet a right or a luxury?

Over the pandemic, schools set up initiatives so kids could have internet at home, to go to class and do their homework. When a school gives a kid a Mi-Fi router (an internet box to take home), sometimes they limit the data. So you can attend lessons, but you can’t watch Netflix. Or they put time limits on it, 8am-8pm. School and homework, no more.

In some ways, this seems reasonable. The kid got the box for school right?

But data poverty (lack of sufficient access to internet) affects large households more, ie. big families. And if you give a device and data to a family, the kids use it for homework, the parents use it for job hunting, food shops, GP access. They all use it to connect with friends, sometimes relatives abroad. For a disconnected family, this can be a big, wonderful change.

Device sharing is never ideal. Sharing a phone or laptop makes it difficult to have a private life online. Some families wait late into the night to do homework, as siblings take it turns to use the limited bandwidth. But if the family can thrive – parents get into work, have income - then the family eats well, has better access to services, is happier, and that kid will do better in school too.

What’s more troubling is organisations wanting to block certain websites. Porn, the dark web – some filters have a clear safety agenda. But some schools or projects ask to block YouTube. This bothers me for three reasons:

1)????Everyone learns differently. Neurodiverse young people, or children with Special Educational Needs often learn better from videos than written text. YouTube is an absolute haven for learning. Education is not limited to online Zoom classes and BBC Bitesize. Do we need to think more expansively about what education can be?

2)????Let them play. The Internet is a massive playground. Yes, there is risky and scary stuff online, but there is also so much joy to be had. Connection, play and curiosity is rampant across gaming platforms, community forums, social media – people deserve access to this. Can we better at teaching safety, instead of limiting access?

3)????Access to activism. Vibrant communities of marginalised groups flourish online. Refugees, asylum seekers, LGBTQ+ young people, people with health conditions and disabilities – many find their people online. Access to the creative commons empowers people to invent tools to tackle the climate crisis and help their communities. Is political engagement through news outlets, forums and debate a right or a nice to have? Should political engagement only be for the monied?

What’s underneath these content limitations is an implicit statement of right vs luxury. If you’re too poor to buy Internet, do you only deserve access to certain parts of it?

Many projects that get people facing social disadvantage online have content filters as a baseline standard. The better ones have ways to switch it off. For example, gambling websites might be blocked as default, but if a student needs to study gambling for a school project, these can be switched off temporarily.

In our rush to get everyone online – with decent speeds, privacy and skills to access – we need to pay attention to the values underpinning these projects. And we need to ask ourselves a careful question: who gets to decide what’s a right and what’s a luxury?

The Data Poverty Lab is formed by The Good Things Foundation. All views expressed here are Kat's own. For more information on the fellowship programme, click here.