Posts Tagged ‘deibert’

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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