There’s freedom, then there’s Freedom
p2pnet.net news:- Yesterday, we featured a p2pnet special on an Open Net Initiative analysis of international efforts to restrict access to the Net.
“The idea that the internet is an unregulated space where free expression is the guiding principle and we can all talk openly took another blow last week with the latest report on net filtering from the Open Net Initiative,” says Bill Thompson.
“Their [the Open Net Initiative] study found many countries were filtering websites and email, and some were blocking new services like voice over IP,” he says. “China, Burma, Tunisia and Iran were among the countries mentioned, and the overall message was that things are getting worse for the open internet.”
But countries and states aren’t all that’s at fault.
Thompson goes on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I had been discussing many of the same issues just a few days earlier at a seminar at Wolfson College, Cambridge, where I am spending a term as a Press Fellow.
My colleague, Chinese journalist and blogger Michael Anti, pointed out that although political expression is tightly controlled in China the government is not really interested in other aspects of people’s lives, while here in the UK we can talk about democracy but other forms of speech are restricted for legal and commercial reasons.
He has a point. The ONI report only looked at official, state-sanctioned filtering, and it did not consider the situation in the UK or US where most controls are imposed by companies trying to protect their reputation or achieve competitive advantage.
Here we see numerous examples of limits on free speech.
Apple has repeatedly sued journalists for revealing details of its product plans.
A Romanian blogger has been threatened with prosecution by a US internet radio station for revealing how to link directly to its audio streams and bypass the media player it wants you to use.
Respected online publisher Jon Newton has been sued over the comments added to an article he posted on the popular p2pnet news site.
Yahoo! has been roundly criticised for removing comments made on the Flickr photosharing site it owns after photographer Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir complained that a commercial company was selling prints of her photos without permission.
And we recently saw the fiasco that resulted when the group that manages copy protection for the new generation of high capacity disks tried to use the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to stop people publishing the number 09:F9:11:02:9D: 74:E3:5B:D8: 41:56:C5: 63:56:88:C0 because with the right software it can be used to decrypt some titles.
These sorts of restrictions happen all the time, and rarely involve direct government action, as we can see on the Chilling Effects website where there are copies of thousands of ‘cease and desist’ letters from lawyers trying to remove web content, including some from the BBC.
Most of us recognise that there are limits on what we can say or do, limits imposed to benefit the wider society and which serve us all, even if they sometimes seem onerous.
The point is not that speech is controlled but the openness with which it is done, the way that limits are discussed and agreed on and the ease with which unreasonable restrictions to freedom of expression can be challenged.
There is also a difference between censorship imposed by governments and the restrictions put in place by people or organisations for themselves.
Yahoo! says that it made a mistake in taking down Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir’s posting, but in fact if the discussion went against the terms of use and included abusive comments then it is under no obligation to host them.
Just as I can’t expect to be allowed to wander into your home and shout at you because you spend your time watching trash TV instead of reading improving books, so my ability to say what I want on private forums is limited.
The same principle applies to Slashdot, Digg, The Guardian or any other organisation that hosts content. Every day I delete dozens of spam comments from my blog and I don’t consider that to be unreasonable censorship.
If the controls are too onerous then the discussion will move elsewhere. If the policy is inconsistently applied or seen to be biased then that will itself form the basis of public discussion, perhaps in other forums.
I’m happy to allow anyone to decide for themselves what they will or will not publish on their own site or service, but it gets a lot more dangerous when we allow individuals or governments to use legal remedies to stop other people speaking out, as with the furore over the HD-DVD key.
And the limits on speech that are acceptable when imposed by private companies as part of their terms and conditions would not be acceptable when imposed by governments.
In an open society we want to be as permissive as possible, limiting free expression only when it is absolutely necessary, and debating such limitations openly.
But we should not expect the rules to be straightforward or universal.
We need to take a more nuanced approach to this fundamental issue, one which allows that different nations, cultures and groups will have different standards, and one which also respects the difference between public and private provision of spaces for publication and debate.
Unfortunately, as I’ve pointed out in the past, nearly all of the open spaces we occupy online are in fact privately controlled and managed.
The real danger in the coming years might not be that governments look at what China has achieved with its ‘Great Firewall’ and decide to emulate it, but that the companies behind our online gathering places become more conservative, more limiting and more repressive, while we find we have nowhere else to go.
Perhaps it’s time for the Open Net Initiative to have a look at filtering policies at Facebook, Bebo and MySpace as well as Burma, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Bill Thompson – andfinally.com
[Thompson is a UK-based writer and broadcaster. He has a weekly column on the BBC WebWise site, and contributes both on and off-line to The Guardian, The Register and The New Statesman, among others. His "inappropriately-titled 'billblog' "appears weekly on BBC News Online in the technology news section.]
Also See:
p2pnet special – State-led Net censorship on the rise, May 22, 2007
f your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen LThe Net baffles Net trial judgeab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:48 am
“The point is not that speech is controlled but the openness with which it is done, the way that limits are discussed and agreed on and the ease with which unreasonable restrictions to freedom of expression can be challenged.”
So a totalitarian regime which was “open” about what it was going to prohibit — say, via publically-available listings of prohibited content — would be morally defensible?
Moreover, there’s the question of what constitutes “reasonable” restrictions. The Roman Catholic church — strictly in the interests of protecting the “greater good” via prohibiting the spread of ‘heresy’ — had, up until very recently, an “index of banned books”. Plausable-sounding defenses can ALWAYS be found for any and all types of such “restrictions”, no matter if they originate from governments, or private organizations.
Was it “unreasonable” for the Church Of Scientology to design the “free internet acess” provided to it’s members, so that it was incapable of displaying information detrimental to that organization’s goals?
Obviously, according the the author of this article, this would have been totally moral, if it had only been “openly admited.”
The truly insideous thing about the spread of tyranny is that people are willing to give it the “benefit of the doubt.”
“There is also a difference between censorship imposed by governments and the restrictions put in place by people or organisations for themselves.”
The only “difference” between censorship by private citizens and GOVERNMENT censorship, is that the nation-state is the only organization which can have you fined, jailed, or killed.
“The point is not that ethnic minorities are being systematically slaughtered in concentration-camps, but the openness with which it is done, the way that this “Final Solution” is discussed and agreed on and the ease with which unreasonable amounts of such slaughter can be challenged.”
Hmm….doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:21 pm
“Tthe openness with which it is done, the way that this “Final Solution” is discussed and agreed on and the ease with which unreasonable amounts of such slaughter can be challenged.”
Without wishing to trivialise what you are saying, you can make the same point about the lawsuits launched by the movie and music industries against their own customers.
May 24th, 2007 at 7:18 am
Something important seems to have been left out.
As long as the legal system is a business and lawyers can make money out of defamation lawsuits, lawyers willbe successful in keeping the people from expressing their thoughts. Not that that is the intention…. after all free speech is necessary as a trap for defamation lawsuits. Something akin to the vague “fair use” in copyright law. An illusion of a right that is really a trap for copyright infringement. That’s the beauty of vagueness in laws. It’s great for the legal business.
It is ironic that this SEEMS what the “we the people” wish and support through a stupid constitution that was created by slave traders (confusingly) called heroes (or founding fathers if you may).
But what SEEMS to be facts (constitution, free speech) is a mirage. People-sheeps are just confused as to what it is that they want because of the continuous brainwashing and lack of education as to how to think critically.
What, then, can you expect from a nation of sheeps?
Rafael Venegas
gvenegas.com