Four in five believe internet access is a fundamental right

By Emma Barnett, Technology and Digital Media Correspondent Published: 11:31AM GMT 08 March 2010

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Seventy-eight per cent of the web users polled hold that the web offers them larger freedom. Photo: CLARE KENDALL

The poll, that collated the answers from some-more than 27,000 people opposite twenty-six countries and was conducted on interest of the BBC World Service, found that 87 per cent of interne t users felt that web entrance should be a simple right. More than 70 per cent of non-users felt they should have entrance to the net.

In Japan, Mexico and Russia, scarcely 75 per cent of respondents pronounced they could not cope but their internet connection. Ninety per cent of those polled in Turkey believed web entrance was a elemental human right, creation it the strongest believer of the at large hold sentiment.

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"The right to promulgate cannot be ignored," Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), told BBC News.

"The internet is the infancy absolute intensity source of note ever created."

He pronounced that governments contingency "regard the internet as simple infrastructure - only similar to roads, rubbish and water".

Seventy-eight per cent pollsters hold that the web gave them larger levels of freedom. This idea was infancy renouned with the US respondents, who were additionally the respondents that were the infancy assured to demonstrate their opinions plainly online.

However, majority web users voiced concerns about the dangers of hacking, rascal and privacy. A infancy of internet users in Japan, Germany, France, China and South Korea were not assured about expressing their opinions online.

But supervision law was not noticed as the scold process to compromise these issues, with over half of the 27,000 respondents similar that that internet "should never be regulated by any turn of supervision anywhere".

Participants in South Korea, Nigeria and Mexico heavily concluded with this matter however the idea was less popularly voiced by respondents in Turkey, Pakistan and China. Only sixteen per cent of the Chinese respondents concluded with the need to safeguard that governments give up from controlling the web. Chinas supervision has faced augmenting inspection after Google, the largest poke engine, bluster to leave the worlds greatest web marketplace progressing this year, since of the countrys despotic censorship manners and suspicions of hacking.

"Despite worries about remoteness and fraud, people around the universe see entrance to the internet as their elemental right," pronounced Doug Miller, the authority of GlobeScan that conducted the survey. "They think the web is a force for good, and infancy don"t wish governments to umpire it."