Internet Access, Negative Rights, and This Week in Law

I was watching the current live stream of This Week in Law and have to take issue with the purely negative view of human rights that guest Timothy Sandefur expressed. His argument against positive rights was that if you have a right to healthcare or food, for example, then nature violates your rights every day. That is a really bad argument, since nature will and does violate your "right to be left alone" all the time. It will even violate your right not to be killed for food if you let it (e.g., if you go into the mountains and run into a hungry mountain lion).

That said, I don't even think that the Right to Internet Access need be a positive right, at least not in the sense of the government making sure you got it. If there were true competition and if corporations didn't coordinate their sales decisions with one another, there'd be no need for government to do anything about Internet access. If one ISP kicked you off, you'd just go to another one. But if the ISP that kicks you off is the only game in town, or if they blackball you so that no other ISP will sell to you, then your negative right to procure Internet access is being violated. This is not the termination of an individual business relationship. It is essentially the removal of of the ability to get a utility essential for having a modern mode of living. As such, there's a strong argument that it should be under the purview of the courts to make sure that there's reasonable due process and your offense justifies the negative impact losing all access to the Internet will have on your life.