I'm sure the guy could have said anything he wanted while he was up on top of that mountain. The right to say anything is not the right to come into your house and take pictures and broadcast them to the world without your permission, even if you have invited me to dinner. His "human right to free speech and free press" were not abridged by the fee to broadcast from Everest. He was still free to go home and say anything he wanted about anything. He could have turned to the Sherpa standing next to him and said whatever he wanted. He could have taken photographs, written a story or poem or essay.
Hence, "free press" and not just "free speech".
Many libertarians (I'm not saying this is you, drinky), go off the rails on this issue. It ends up with "speech = money, money = speech" which dead ends at "paying people to vote". It is a sentiment that comes from believing that the people with the most money have your best interest at heart, which comes from missing Daddy.
Nobody has your best interest at heart, except you. Anyone who claims to believe in the benevolence of abstract others has no idea what libertarianism is about.
I don't blame Nepal for being very stingy with their heritage sites.
It's not being stingy, it's changing the terms after the fact. If they don't want video recorded and transmitted, then they should charge a broadcaster's fee to anyone who brings a device capable of recording and transmitting video. We could go on and on with this "but the law said! the law must be followed!" bullshit all day long, but at the end of the day the law is never 100% clear and no one knows the law 100%, even in his own country, nonetheless a foreign one. Upfront enforcement should be the norm wherever possible, as it leaves nothing to doubt.
The West believes about every place on earth, about every culture, "Fuck them, I do what I want because I've this big bag of money hanging between my legs" and yet when the people whose home they are in want to charge for the goodies it's all, "FREE SPEECH!! FREE SPEECH!! HUMAN RIGHTS!!". This ends in the "human right of white people to exploit the Third World".
The funny thing about hosting someone with a "big bag of money hanging between [his] legs" is that you get to negotiate how much of that money the person will give to you in exchange for what you can offer to him. Someone running the gateway to the most well known mountain in the world should probably have some idea of how to negotiate with foreigners who want to climb it. No one has ever been "exploited" except because of his own ignorance or gullibility.
Let's not bullshit. The libertarians who make the most noise (and I'm not saying this is you, drink) don't give one flip about human rights. They're children of privilege who are trying to press their advantage, nothing more.
Indeed, there are natural rights (life, liberty, and property), and the rest is all privileges and entitlements, none of which is a "human right".