A few weeks ago, the United States handed over control of the Domain Name System (DNS) to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), meaning that the US Department of Commerce no longer controls the allocation of domain names for websites. This means America doesn’t own the internet anymore. Right?
Well, no matter what Sen. Ted Cruz says, that’s just false. While Sen. Cruz and Attorney Generals from Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Texas were concerned about autocratic regimes dictating terms on the internet, they failed to realize that no one governs the internet. No one can truly ever control it. The internet feels sort of like a wayward child. Sure, the US government developed it in conjunction with dozens of scientists, but they have lost the right to actually control it, according to Barlow.
Unfortunately, control over the internet is very real. Censorship is rampant around the world. In India and Turkey, social media are regularly taken down and monitored to reduce rallying cries for protests and anti-government sentiment. “Morphed” (or Photoshopped) pictures of Prime Minister Narendra Modi often land normal kids in jail.
I had the fortunate experience to attend the WikiConference USA in 2015, held in Washington, DC. There, I attended a talk on Wikipedia censorship in Russia and China, where they decried the lack of freedom to criticize the governments or post about potentially “obscene” content. Wikipedia is run only by volunteers and the Wikimedia Foundation, who work together to advocate for open information and the open internet, but even they recognize that, in some cases, self-censorship can help. In Russia, articles about Marijuana no longer discuss how to smoke/consume it after those articles had been banned. While this may not be ideal, it allows for a solid compromise.
On the flip side, when the album cover for Virgin Killer, by Scorpions, was found to publicly depict child pornography, the Internet Watch Foundation blacklisted any references to the album in the United Kingdom. This accidentally barred editing access to Wikipedia across the country. The question remains, however, do governments have a right to bar “obscene” content in the same way they do on TV and Radio?
I would say that, yes, they do; however, they, in practice, can’t. The internet is a truly global system. TV and Radio are all local entities. It’s expensive and capital-intensive to set up a radio station or a TV channel. Reaching millions of people is near-impossible without a lot of investment. These barriers to entry make TV and Radio easy to regulate. On the internet, on the other hand, anyone and everyone can post whatever they want from wherever they want for whomever the want (read: everyone). This means that even if the government were to shut down websites and sources of information, others could easily pop-up. Workarounds, such as proxies, are prevalent. Without literally uprooting infrastructure, like North Korea, it’s impossible to actually bar access to content on the internet.
So, while no one may own the internet, governments can and do ban access to content. They have the right to regulate what their own citizens see and consume, but ultimately are unable to sustain/enforce those bans.
A thoughtful piece; thanks for writing this.
You bring up a nice tension between the freedom of speech that the internet seems to give and the increasing control that more repressive (or protective, depending on your point of view) governments have over the content on the internet. Do you see this as an on-going arms race between those who put up content and those who shut it down, or do you think that some sort of middle ground will develop? This will be especially central to the discussion we have next week about cyber crime and cyber war…
Thank you, Prof. Waldo! To a certain degree, I cannot see regulation as all bad; it has its merits. And, while governments do decide, in some cases arbitrarily, what is right and what is wrong, they do so on every platform, on and off the internet. So, in that sense, this is a separate issue from internet repression. At some point, I believe that while some groups like Wikileaks will continue to fight for universal free speech, there will be some regulation accepted by the people, at the very least in cases of national security, reflecting the “shouting fire in a crowded theater” thought process codified in the Schenck v. United States decision of 1919.