In Spain, every citizen will have a legal right to affordable high-speed Internet service by 2011. That makes Spain the second country in the world to declare broadband access a right; Finland was the first. Several other countries — for example, France and Estonia — have already declared Internet access (but not necessarily high-speed access) to be a human right.

And yet the people who claim to govern us are conspiring to implement a three-strikes regime that would cut off your Internet access if anyone accuses you three times of online copyright infringement. It’s part of an international copyright treaty called ACTA — a treaty that’s being negotiated in strict secrecy, with participants apparently required to sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent them from telling ordinary folks like you and me what’s going on. (Big business, of course, already has access to all the information that’s being kept from the general public.)

Meanwhile, here on BC’s Pender Island, smack in the middle of the ferry corridor from Vancouver to Victoria, many people still don’t have access to high-speed Internet connections. According to this month’s Pender Post (not online, sorry), Shaw had planned to apply for funding from the federal government to extend its existing broadband infrastructure to cover the whole island, but they pulled out three days before the funding deadline, leaving many residents in the lurch. In fact, in many parts of BC, your Internet options are still limited to unreliable satellite connections — that is, if you can get a connection at all. You could argue that BC is a special case because of its geography, but the same problem hasn’t prevented Finland from guaranteeing its citizens’ right to accessible high-speed Internet.

Oh, and that funding that Shaw was going to apply for? That’s part of a federal initiative called Broadband Canada, which has $225 million to allocate over three years to extending high-speed Internet coverage in Canada. Which is great, as far as it goes — only it doesn’t go nearly far enough: Broadband Canada received a total of $972 million in funding requests, and as we can infer from the situation on Pender Island, even that doesn’t cover the existing demand.

(Hat tip to Slashdot for the first two links.)