{"id":1700,"date":"2013-06-03T09:13:03","date_gmt":"2013-06-03T13:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/herdict\/?p=1700"},"modified":"2013-05-31T14:13:22","modified_gmt":"2013-05-31T18:13:22","slug":"the-balkanisation-of-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/2013\/06\/03\/the-balkanisation-of-the-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"The Balkanisation of the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month it was reported that Syria had once again blocked\u00a0access to the internet<\/a>. Both Google and Renesys, an internet monitoring service, reported the outage. The incident comes after a similar blackout in November of last year, when activists were attempting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. Last year\u2019s blackout was blamed on \u2018terrorism,\u2019 while this most recent event on a technical fault<\/a>. David Belson of Akamai Technologies has analysed the situation and told the BBC that the fault blamed couldn\u2019t have caused a complete internet blackout<\/a>. Al Jazeera has meanwhile reported that military sources within Syria have claimed the blackout was part of a security force operation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Our ability to communicate openly finds itself continually under assault, subject to geographic restrictions. \u00a0Recently, Freedom House released their\u00a0Freedom of the Press report<\/a>, which found that \u2018the percentage of the world\u2019s population living in societies with a fully free press has fallen to its lowest level in over a decade.<\/a>\u2019 It seems that censorship is increasing in all areas of the media and in countries all over the world. Western Europe was found to have suffered an \u2018unprecedented decline\u2019 in press freedom in 2012. The report also noted that \u2018new media\u2019 was subject to \u2018heightened contestation\u2019 in the last year. Freedom of the Net 2012 Report<\/a>\u00a0 illuminates\u00a0these evolving threats to internet freedom, online press, and bloggers.<\/p>\n

Each country has a very different idea about what is and what isn\u2019t acceptable content, and thanks to increasingly fine-grained technological controls, it is increasingly within nations’ power to select the content their citizens can see. \u00a0Thus, we are increasingly experiencing the \u2018balkanisation\u2019 of the internet<\/a>, with a different version of the Internet available in each country and the dream of an entirely free, accessible, and global Internet becoming just a dream. As Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith discussed in their 2006 book, Who Controls the Internet?<\/em>, the world wide web is becoming a “bordered internet” — a “collection of nation-state networks<\/a>“. Ryan Budish already highlighted on this blog<\/a> the difference between the Internet with a big I – the<\/em> one network that connects everyone – and internet with little i – little local networks.<\/p>\n

While the difference between the tightly controlled networks of China and the Middle East and the relatively free Internet of the West is obvious, there are differences even between individual European countries, and between Europe and the US. The US generally applies its First Amendment principles to hold that speech should be free unless it is used to incite violence or is criminal in nature (such as child pornography). \u00a0In contrast, Europe tends to be far more concerned about the possible results of offensive or hateful speech, having experienced first-hand the extremes of both fascism and communism.<\/p>\n

European law also recognises the \u2018right to be forgotten,\u2019<\/a> which allows criminals who have served their time to object to the publication of facts about their conviction. Under the First Amendment in the US, the publication of an individual\u2019s criminal history is protected. In the Internet age, this means that there is a question of how the \u2018right to be forgotten\u2019 should apply to the world of social media. In January 2012, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, Viviane Reding, said that \u2018If an individual no longer wants his personal data to be processed or stored by a data controller, and if there is no legitimate reason for keeping it, the data should be removed from their system.<\/a>\u2019 For US lawmakers, the \u2018right to be forgotten\u2019 represents a significant threat to free speech.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the leaders of Google, Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks continue to make their own decisions about what is and what isn\u2019t acceptable content. \u00a0For example, Facebook was severely criticised for its decision not to remove the Innocence of the Muslims<\/em> video, which was initially blamed for causing riots<\/a> all over the Middle East, while simultaneously\u00a0censoring a political ad<\/a> that criticised Facebook\u2019s founder Mark Zuckerberg. Jeffrey Rosen at the New Republic has suggested that \u2018the Deciders\u2019 of the big social networks are in many ways more powerful<\/a> when it comes to the issue of online free speech than any government. It is important to remember, however, that the social networks are driven by profit rather than principle. If it is in their financial interests to censor content, they will do so, as Facebook proved by deeming all criticism of Ataturk<\/a>, no matter where in the world it originates or is seen, as unacceptable, even though it is only illegal in Turkey.<\/p>\n

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, has warned in the Guardian<\/a> that in the coming years \u2018Each state will attempt to regulate the\u00a0internet, and shape it in its own image.\u2019 With the increased balkanisation of the internet, even a kind of visa requirement may become necessary, \u2018controlling the flow of information in both directions.\u2019<\/p>\n

Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer at Renesys, has found that there is a \u2018silver lining\u2019<\/a> to all of the attacks on Internet freedom, stating that \u2018every significant Internet disconnection, and the local and global reaction of outrage and dismay, sends an important signal about the fragility of the underlying system. It makes single points of failure and control visible, so that those fragilities can be found and fixed, and the Internet as a whole can continue to gain strength from disorder.\u2019<\/p>\n

Whether Eric Schmidt\u2019s dark predictions or Jim Cowie\u2019s more hopeful ones will come true remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the global Internet is under threat, and that a concerted effort must be made to protect its freedom and accessibility.<\/p>\n

Jean-Loup Richet – Herdict Special Contributor<\/strong><\/p>\n

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This month it was reported that Syria had once again blocked\u00a0access to the internet. Both Google and Renesys, an internet monitoring service, reported the outage. The incident comes after a similar blackout in November of last year, when activists were attempting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. Last year\u2019s blackout was blamed on \u2018terrorism,\u2019 while this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4591,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4236],"tags":[3687,497,72546,64319],"class_list":["post-1700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-herdict-web","tag-censorship","tag-google","tag-renesys","tag-right-to-be-forgotten"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4LdGs-rq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4591"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1700"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1711,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700\/revisions\/1711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}