Posts Tagged ‘censorship’

This fall, a wide ranging group of academics, activists and businesses announced the Global Network Initiative – a set of principles and governance mechanisms for ICT corporations operating in authoritarian states. As readers of this blog know, this is just the type of thing I’m interested in, and I jumped on the opportunity to write a term paper about the topic.

So, for my Science and Technology in the Global Arena course I wrote a paper about the role of American Internet companies operating in China. A lot has been written on the subject, of course, but I think the paper adds to the field by arguing that these companies could do much more beyond the Global Network Initiative (which is still laudatory). It is embedded below and a PDF is available here. Let me know what you think.

Freedom Fighters: The Role of Internet Corporations in Promoting Digital Freedoms

In the past, I’ve written about censorship on the Internet, especially the Chinese example. It is a touchy subject for many – bringing up both ardent nationalism and unabashed support for free expression. Like many topics of debate which tend to have emotional currents, it is difficult at times to address the substantive issues. That’s why this nuanced point of view on Chinese net censorship is so refreshing. Though I may disagree with the author on some of the points, it provides a good view. Some choice quotes:

“Often, people speak of “censorship” without acknowledging that there is a background of this kind of contest going on. Fundamentally, the assumption behind the intuition that “censorship” is bad is that other people ought to see things just the way we see them. And that may be a laudable goal or a bad goal. But it’s not self-evident. To say that someone else is censoring is to say that they are not seeing things the way we want to see them, and whether the views of those others are “authentic” (in the sense of being liberal or democratic) may be relevant or not to the determination, but again it’s not self-evident.”

and

“You view the Chinese search results as “censored,” but actually, every time I do a search on Tiananmen on Google I feel I’m watching the result of a Google bomb. To me, the iconic image of Tiananmen is the one where Chairman Mao stood up and declared the founding of the People’s Republic. That moment is the dividing line between pre-modern China and modern China, and for many Chinese it is an image that is much more potent than the images of the protests.”

These are genuine, reflective opinions on an issue which is not as binary as it is often made out to be.

Continuing through Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media,” his explanation of the growth of the motion picture industry included an in-depth description of the political disputes over the new medium. Facing strong opposition from the self-appointed guardians of morality, the movie makers created internal guidelines of censorship. However, they didn’t always follow them to the level of Puritanical morality which some wanted. In addition, the Supreme Court had created legal precedents which weakened the level of First Amendment protection offered to movies as opposed to newspapers and other print media.

“The differences in outcomes between print and screen reflected the different legal and economic conditions of the two media. Not only did the Constitution and the courts afford stronger protection to the press; the far more fragmented publishing industry had no central organization comparable to the Hays Office that could have carried out a neocorporatist form of censorship. The movies became the target of Catholic pressure in the 1930s because key figures in the movement understood that the industry was vulnerable to pressure and because moral reformers, both Catholic and Protestant, had come to believe that the movies were singularly important as a destructive influence.”

Is today’s media environment more like print or screen? An explosion of online publication and distribution may serve to counteract mainstream media consolidation, but do new media sources really mirror the fragmentation of nineteenth-century news? With the oligopolistic market status of ISPs, no. In fact, Usenet might once have been thought to be fragmented and resilient to censorship, but in recent weeks, it has been severely filtered. The source of control: ISPs who are “voluntarily” censoring Usenet to stop certain child pornographers, just like the Hays Office which was heavy handed and overbearing.

[Other posts in this series here and here.]

I have a post up at Techdirt about Chinese efforts to control Internet discussions through crowdsourcing:

“Wikipedia crowdsourced Britannica. Threadless did the same with graphic T-shirts. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk helped crowdsource the search for Steve Fosset. Now, the Chinese Internet censors are using the process to aid in their control of information online.”

Head over and check it out.

Continuing the Publius Project this week is an essay by Ronald Deibert of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. In it, he calls for the defense of the global communication environment which faces a growing number of threats from a variety of actors. His involvment with the OpenNet Initiative has made Deibert keenly aware of the role that governments play in censoring the net; from Belarus to Burma governments censor the Internet and as Pakistan’s YouTube snafu shows, these can have broad ramifications. Profit-maximizing telcos are hoping to end net neutrality and, further, he points to the military and intelligence officials taking an interest in the net and is worried by the effect. “[M]otivated by short-term security and cultural concerns, dozens of governments and corporations are carving up, colonizing, and militarizing the once seamless Internet environment.”

Deibert ends the brief essay with a call to reestablish the foundational ethics of the Internet: collaboration, openness, free expression and tinkering. His call to arms is similar to Zittrain’s support of generativity and represents an increased awareness that the halcyon days of the Internet’s youth may be entering a time of great threat from short-sighted exclusionary and competitive behavior by governments and corporations.

In that same vein is Susan Crawford’s brainchild, OneWebDay – an annual day of celebration of the Web. What Earth Day is for the environment, OneWebDay, September 22nd, is for the Web. By focusing on the principles which enable so much creativity and community, OneWebDay is an important tool in defense of the Internet.

[Previous response to the Publius Project]

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