Conceptualizing the Right to Access to Technology

Accepting that a wider distribution of access to technology is, like wider access to education in general, a social good that is usually to be applauded and promoted, my role is not to defend a broader access to technology but rather to suggest the ways in which an advocate might invoke legal categories and concepts in order to advance that goal. By focusing on legal categories, I should emphasize, I wish to slide past any general moral argument about the injustice of the overall distribution of wealth and how a more just distribution could most efficaciously solve many special problems of unequal access to technology. I am sure that that is true, but you did not have me fly out from Boston to tell you that. Rather, I hope to take on the more limited task of asking whether there are ways of framing the question of access to technology in primarily legal terms.