Using the four technological revolutions—printing, telecommunication, the Internet, and artificial intelligence—as pivotal points, this paper reveals the stepwise evolution of information rights from "knowledge equity," "information equity," and "participation equity" towards "expression equity." Through the mechanism of declining marginal costs, the paper explains how technology lowers the barriers to information production and dissemination, thereby promoting the diffusion of rights from elite monopolies to the masses. Simultaneously, it points out that technological empowerment has not led to an equal distribution of rights; instead, each stage has fostered new forms of monopoly. The lag in institutional responses further exacerbates the alienation of empowerment. Genuine equity requires the synergistic coordination of three dimensions: "tool accessibility," "capability compatibility," and "institutional guarantee," to transcend the limitations of formal equity and advance towards substantive equality.
Yu Beiming (Wed,) studied this question.