Merten Reglitz proposes a new human right that ensures internet access for those who cannot afford it and protects that right from arbitrary interferences by those who would exploit it for harm. The first part of the book justifies the claim for this new right by showing how internet access is vital for the enjoyment of human rights around the globe. In the second part, Reglitz specifies the content of this right, assessing today’s standard threats to internet access. He recommends a minimum international standard of connectivity and explains how states have misused the internet. He documents how private companies already manipulate both internet access and content to maximise profit, and how lack of rights enforcement allows people to harm others online. The book establishes that a new human right to free internet access is essential to secure its role for the benefit and progress, not detriment, of humanity.

States are primary duty-bearers and major threats to free internet access. The chapter sets out the second meaning of ‘free’ internet access as ‘free from arbitrary interference’. Most internet users live in states where internet access and use is unfree. Autocratic states use the internet to monitor, manipulate, and control their citizens by what has become known as ‘digital authoritarianism’. The chapter uses the examples of Russia and China to show that, when they disrespect free internet access, states turn the internet into a repression technology. Examples include Russia’s technological and legal control of cyberspace and China’s Golden Shield Project, its Great Firewall, and its emerging social credit system. Democratic states also misuse the internet to spy unjustly on their citizens, as was revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013. The chapter explains why indiscriminate mass surveillance practices of democratic states are unjustifiable and harm people’s human right to privacy. It also sets out a list of moral obligations states have as part of the human right to free internet access: that they must respect, protect, and not undermine internet freedom.

China has little public politics. But political technology overlaps with authoritarian methods of social and information control. In India, the world's biggest democracy, the BJP has developed mass participatory propaganda to build a Hindu national state since 2015.