Opportunities and Challenges in
Southeast Asia, 2019 (Bangkok, Thailand)
19
Table 3: Two Different Paradigms of “Digital” and Associated Rights
Digital as spaces
Digital as data representation of physical
entities
¨ Rights to freedom of expression,
association and assembly online
¨ Right to consumer protection
¨ Right to seek joy and pleasure
¨ Right to exist free from violence,
hateful speech, and harassment
¨ Right to not be discriminated
¨ Right to have informed consent on
participation
¨
¨
¨
¨
Right to data privacy
Right to freedom from digital surveillance
Right to data ownership and control
Right to data security and protection
There are certain rights mentioned that do not fall within the digital paradigms. These
are rights that pertain to the access to, and the governance of the digital (see Table 4).
Access and governance can be grouped together under a developmental paradigm, as
access is one of the key concerns of information and communication technologies for
development (ICT4D), and governance has to do with the contestations of power to
define the direction of the development of digital environments.
Table 4: Two Different Paradigms of Digital Development and Associated Rights
Access to the digital
Governance of the digital
¨ Right to access state and other
services online
¨ Right to access the Internet
¨ Right to access information and
content
¨ Right to access hardware/software
¨ Right to participate in digital governance
processes or be consulted on Internet policy
issues
Four Spheres of Digital Rights
The framework proposed therefore includes four spheres, organised by two sets of
paradigms as discussed in the previous section: the digital, and the developmental (See
Table 5). The framework provides a structure to think about digital rights and is not a
neat categorisation of each individual right; certainly, some rights may belong to more
than one of the spheres. Through thinking about digital rights from these four spheres,
we are able to draw from their respective areas of academic literature. From the data
collected from the focus groups, it is also apparent that each sphere comes with its own
implications and challenges. The following sections provide further elaborations. As one
can dive as deeply into each sphere as one wants to, here I will only provide an idea of
what the sphere entails as far as it makes sense within the scope of this paper, combining
the insights from literature and from the data collected.