The Handbook of Communication Rights, Law, and Ethics. Группа авторов

      Given the possibility of receiving content over 360°, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year – music, radio on the subway, WIFI on airplanes, tablets, and TV in airports – one speaks today of the “right to disconnect” as another part of the “right to receive.” A good example is the US court decision in Hill v. Colorado (2000), which talks about a “right not to receive information”¹³ that is part of freedom of speech in US law.

      At the global level, we can say that actively exercising the right to receive or not receive information requires information pluralism (Lecaros 2003, pp. 57–80) – that is, the freedom to create media. The right to receive or not receive information presupposes the freedom to create media, because without such media, there would be no information to receive. Any restriction or administrative condition imposed on the creation of media, in the form of a requirement for authorization, licenses, or concessions, disrupts the ability to create – sometimes gravely so – and reduces media pluralism. This, in turn, disrupts the ability to choose information – that is, to receive it or not. I fear that in developing countries pluralism is scarce. This discrimination can be reduced only by providing Internet access.

Unfortunately, in many countries, the notion that radio and television are state property, as was indeed the case in Europe until the liberalization of the telecommunications industry at the end of the 1990s, has led to a system of licenses and concessions that regulates the existence of audiovisual media. Another challenge to the ability to receive information is legislation that restricts freedom of information. Such legislation runs the gamut from laws that enshrine censorship – which, as we have seen, threaten social websites such as Twitter and Facebook – to content-publishing platforms such as YouTube and even cloud sites like Google Drive, as well as to regulations that restrict specific types of information for religious, social, economic, or political reasons. Any restriction on the dissemination of information is a direct attack on the right to communicate. Of course, freedom has its risks, but they are less evident than the risks that come with the absence of freedom.

      Another threat to the ability to receive information, which has been and remains present in many countries, is the excessive presence of the state in media ownership, to the point that private initiatives are squashed or such initiatives must compete with state-run operations at an unfair disadvantage, if for no other reason than that state-run media can draw on government funding and even supplement their budgets from private advertising. Under these circumstances, the right to receive information is annulled or at least weakened, and the state has its own powerful media.

      At the opposite extreme lies the hyperconcentration of wealth in private hands in the United States, which has included the development of large media conglomerates. This situation also affects the ability to receive information. When none of the media in a country is public, some voices in that society may go unrepresented, and many perspectives will be neglected, especially in highly fragmented societies. This situation may be exacerbated by the current state of the online news market, characterized by the central role of social media platforms in providing access to the news. These players, whose ownership is also concentrated in a few hands, have an outsized role in controlling both revenue streams for media companies, as they control large parts of the advertising market, and the flow of information itself, as they command large audiences and dictate what news content can reach them, as well as how and when it will do so (see Cetina Presuel and Martínez Sierra 2019).

      Other threats to exercising the freedom to receive information, as well as threats to the freedom of selecting information, which all individuals should have, could be mentioned. The most positive solution is to encourage the creation of news companies that have a clear commitment to independence and a strong sense of responsibility as expressed by Nieto¹⁴ (1973). Several such examples of new media have emerged in recent years, such as journalist societies (sociétés de rédacteurs). These may not resolve problems completely, but they do allow business risks to be spread over diverse stakeholders.

      The Right to Impart Information

      The right to impart information is the third and last component of the right to communicate established by the UDHR. The right to seek information was the most difficult to exercise in the pre-Internet era. But things are different in the Web 3.0 era. No one questions the right to impart information; in fact, it is the oldest of the first claims to “freedom of expression, printing and press.” The very term “freedom of expression” or “right of expression” puts us in direct contact with dissemination of information. As a result, we can affirm, without exaggeration, that the concept of expression – intimately tied to the concept of dissemination – forms the basis of the rights that I have been analyzing in this chapter.

These rights are complex because not all subjects among individuals, professionals, and organizations can disseminate information. Here I define information as the sum total of ideas and opinions. What makes these rights difficult to understand is the so-called universal subject (the general public): we must understand whether and how the public, without access to news media and without being journalists, can participate in the dissemination of information, news, and opinions. Few options were available before the social Web appeared. One solution was writing letters to the editor, in which an individual could give his or her opinion on certain information or even offer information. Another option was the so-called right to rectification in the event that an individual wished to correct false information in the media.

      In the Internet era, individuals can participate in the dissemination of information and opinions through several channels:

       user blogs, including children’s blogs;

       posts on social sites;

       comments in forums on daily newspaper websites;

       opinions sent to the radio via WhatsApp;

       weather photos provided by viewers of national TV news programs;

       online competitions; and

       opinions sent to TV programs by SMS.

      In democracies, a particularly important time for citizen participation in the diffusion of information is during election campaigns. During these, flows of ideas and information between candidates, representatives, and voters are essential for citizen participation in democracy, as the UN Human Rights Committee pointed out when it “elaborated on the importance of freedom of expression for the conduct of public affairs and the effective exercise of the right to vote. The free communication of information and ideas about public and political issues between citizens, candidates and elected representatives is essential. This implies a free press and other media able to comment on public issues and to inform public opinion without censorship or restraint.”¹⁵ Ensuring information flow requires greater press freedom and the absence of censorship. Thus, democratic states are obligated to promote information dissemination during elections.

      The strong development of technologies for information sharing, coupled with the globalizing nature of today’s world, is giving citizens an increasingly strong and effective presence in the information world. As a result, it is increasingly common for citizens to become disseminators of news and opinions. For example, in some cases, bloggers can acquire millions of followers and become opinion leaders. Unless they are journalists, such individuals cannot be considered qualified subjects or qualified informers in the legal sense of those terms, yet they become true centers of information dissemination.

      Today, many legal possibilities exist for individuals to contribute to information dissemination. These run the gamut from “collaborative journalism,” such as the consortium that covered the Panama Papers, to news media that mimic journalist societies, such as Le Monde; information providers that follow various entrepreneurial models from individual property to crowdfunding initiatives, such as the Dutch daily De Correspondent (MediaLab Press 2017); and finally classical limited companies and corporations. As De Correspondent cofounder and editor Ernst-Jan Pfauth declared (Wijnberg 2014), “If we call someone a subscriber, it suggests that person is a passive consumer who pays for content, reads it and that’s all. What