[This arti­cle orig­i­nally found here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10374831 – 2.html]

Finland’s Min­istry of Trans­port and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions has made 1-megabit broad­band Web access a legal right, YLE, the country’s national broad­cast­ing com­pany, reported on Wednes­day.

Accord­ing to the report, every per­son in Fin­land (a lit­tle over 5 mil­lion peo­ple, accord­ing to a 2009 esti­mate) will have the right of access to a 1Mb broad­band con­nec­tion start­ing in July. And they may ulti­mately gain the right to a 100Mb broad­band connection.

Just more than a year ago, Fin­land said it would make a 100Mb broad­band con­nec­tion a legal right by the end of 2015. Wednesday’s announce­ment is con­sid­ered an inter­me­di­ate step.

France, one of a few coun­tries that has made Inter­net access a human right, did so ear­lier this year. France’s Con­sti­tu­tional Coun­cil ruled that Inter­net access is a basic human right. That said, it stopped short of mak­ing “broad­band access” a legal right. Fin­land says that it’s the first coun­try to make broad­band access a legal right.

But Finland’s def­i­n­i­tion of “access” to broad­band is a lit­tle fuzzy. Accord­ing to the Helsinki Times when it reported the 100Mb tar­get last year, the Finnish gov­ern­ment said that no house­hold “would be far­ther than 2 kilo­me­ters from a con­nec­tion capa­ble of deliv­er­ing broad­band Inter­net with a capac­ity of at least 100 megabits of data a sec­ond.” It did say, though, that “about 2,000 (house­holds) in far-flung cor­ners of the coun­try” wouldn’t be included. Osten­si­bly, Fin­land plans to keep that same dis­tri­b­u­tion when its 1Mb broad­band access is implemented.

Fin­land has long been a tech-industry leader that has done a fine job invest­ing in tech­nol­ogy, more than many of its Euro­pean coun­ter­parts. It’s also home to Nokia, among other tech firms.