During the 2nd day of the "Digital Natives with a Cause?" workshop in Santiago, we had a bar camp and Andres Azpura proposed talking about digital rights. I joined the conversation a bit late, but I was able to learn a lot about how Luis Carlos and Roberto from Peru, Joan from the Dominican Republic and Brendon from Trinidad and Tobago see questions about digital rights.

What was most interesting to me was the lack of conversation on the modern state. I think that whenever one enters into a discussion about rights, the concept of the state must be talked about. Rights, after all, exist only in the discourse of states, they are recognized by states and safeguarded by states. I talked a bit about this with Brendon more on the connection between rights and justice. For some reason, our conversation centered around ISPs, private corporations, and companies. And I am not too sure corporations formally recognize or even care about rights.

Private corporations have customers, and they have services. States have citizens and have rights. And yet - its not so simple, because private corporations serve a key role in our societies, for example they provide the infrastructure through which people access the internet and access information.

So how do we include corporations into a discussion about digital rights? what role do they play? with whom do they talk and engage with?

Our group also talked about how the different standards in technology limit people's access. We talked about how corporations limit the access to content based on geographic regions based on the profit they would get from advertising. For example, Hulu and Pandora in the US. This is not the only way corporations can eschew accessibility: Telefonica, which is a huge telecommunication company in Latin America owns Terra.com which is an online news and media portal. Telefonica in Spain includes access to Terra at a lower cost and its included in the basic mobile internet package.

Everyone at this workshop is involved with social change in some way or another, and I think we see the internet not much as a service or commodity but more as a tool to educate, a medium to connect, a way to empower. But still, we are forced to enter into a relationship with corporations, and in a way our practice is constrained by the limitation of their world perspective. This relationship is very one-sided though, it is definitely not a dialogue: activists and business are not meeting in the middle.

(To be continued)