The wonderful thing about the original Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, says TechLiberation, was that they didn’t create any expensive entitlements that required affirmative state action. Instead, they tightly bound government and curtailed its powers and left the people at liberty.
By contrast, these new “Declaration of Internet Freedom” and “Digital Bill of Rights” contain all sorts of aspirational principles that could be construed as “positive rights” that require government to provide some sort of basic underlying service, or to affirmatively and aggressively regulate the information economy to protect some of these amorphous values.
The author affirms that it would be very easy to convert rights as “Access” and “Openness” into an affirmative mandate to subsidize or regulate, and fears that if these manifestos really influenced public policy they would both just result in more legislative meddling and regulatory adventurism.
Please read the whole story here (and here’s why I think you should)