Right to Surf, Dude

The last thing you would associate Finland and the Finns with is surfing. Insofar as jumping onto planks of wood and riding the waves is concerned you would probably be better off on a beach in Waikiki or Ooolalallalawotawave. There is another kind of surfing though that has just been granted the status of a legal right in the country that is neither Scandinavian nor Baltic but that just sits prettily between the two agglomerations.

“You have the right to surf the net at a broadband speed. You have the right to be constantly connected to the information superhighway. You have the right to kill off the boredom of those endless days and sleepless nights by hooking up to the virtual world“. That, in paraphrased J’accuse parlance, is what every Finnish citizen has just acquired thanks to a bold move by the Finnish government.

From 1 July every Finn will have the right to access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection. Finland has vowed to connect everyone to a 100Mbps connection by 2015.

To boldly go where no government has gone before is admirable. To do so with the declared intent to bring everyone up to standard on the information society is pure genius. The logic, according to Finland’s communication minister, is that it is useless to develop an information society if not everybody is using it. This is surely one way to tackle a huge source of poverty – ignorance.

Now listen to this. A poll conducted by the BBC World Service earlier in 2010 found out that “almost four in five people around the world believed that access to the internet is a fundamental right”. Way to go Berners-Lee.

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