Internet Access and Paid Continuity

Legitimacy Foundations — Paper III

Internet service is often described as optional, modern, or discretionary. That description no longer reflects how it functions.

Access to the internet is purchased. It is paid for as a recurring service. It is not a gift, a subsidy, or a charitable provision. It is a contracted utility-like relationship in which one party controls access to a system the other depends upon.

Withdrawal of that access does not merely inconvenience. It excludes.

Employment applications, scheduling, and payroll increasingly assume continuous connectivity. Healthcare portals, appointment systems, test results, and insurance communications rely on online access. Education, licensing, benefits administration, emergency information, and basic civic participation are now mediated through the network.

Loss of access does not isolate a person socially. It removes them procedurally.

This matters because the law already recognizes continuity of service where withdrawal produces foreseeable bodily harm. Utilities are regulated on this basis.

Internet service differs only in visibility, not in effect.

The harm produced by disconnection is indirect but foreseeable. Exclusion from work leads to loss of income. Loss of access to healthcare systems delays care. Inability to receive notices, complete forms, or communicate produces cascading risks that ultimately attach to the body.

The mechanism is not deprivation of information. It is exclusion from systems that organize survival.

Control over internet access is centralized. A small number of providers determine whether a person may participate in the digital environment that now governs daily life.

Despite these conditions, internet service is framed as voluntary in a way utilities are not.

The distinction isn’t based on payment. Both services are paid.

It isn’t based on control. Both are centralized.

It isn’t based on harm. In both cases, harm is foreseeable.

The distinction rests only on classification.

This observation doesn’t propose a new right. It doesn’t argue that internet service should be free.

It simply describes the condition that already exists.

A system that routes survival through a paid access pathway while denying continuity obligations for that pathway creates a contradiction.

Continuity already governs the consequences. It’s only absent from the rule.

2026