Caught in the web: who controls the Internet? @Battle of Ideas

Panellists at this session of the Institute of Ideas' annual Battle of Ideas festival were:

• Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship
• Dr Tim Jordan, Open University, author of Hacking: digital media and technological determinism
• Rob Killick, CEO, cScape
• Cassandra Wilkinson, author of Don’t panic: nearly everything is better than you think

Key takeouts from this session were:

• An important question is – does the internet render the fight for free speech unnecessary? Or, in fact, is the internet at risk of becoming even more regulated than real life? Certainly, the great libertarian godfathers of the internet didn’t bargain for new forms of censorship to emerge. There is more potential for control and regulation in cyberspace than there is outside. Compare browsing in a library with browsing on the web, where the act of opening a page is exposable to other people or organisations.
• The new censors of the internet aren’t the usual suspects. Instead, they’re like a layer of middlemen. A great example is Smart Filter by Secure Computing in California. Used by some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes and also in the US, its list of blocked sites is so secret that even the countries using the software are kept in the dark, and can affect more sites than you might think – for example gay and lesbian sites wrongly interpreted as being porn. The list of blocked sites is the intellectual property of Secure Computing and is protected by copyright.
• This week Yahoo and Google signed up to a voluntary agreement to protect freedom of speech in their business practices. This code of conduct took 18 months to formulate, and they’re now trying to persuade hardware suppliers to sign up. Cisco were invited to the discussions, but declined to participate. They argue that in transactions such as the supply of hardware to the Chinese government, the application of the technology they supply is not their responsibility (I’m sure I’m not the only anti-censorship activist who’s broadly sympathetic with this position).
• On “takedown notices” and their censorship implications – a group of researchers put up a fake JS Mills Appreciation Society website containing quotes from the 19th century philosopher and freedom advocate, quotes which, of course, are now out of copyright. The same researchers then sent a takedown notice to the UK ISP on the basis of a copyright contravention, who immediately obliged, taking the site down even though the text is out of copyright. A significant global trend is how easy it is to get ISP to remove material on the basis of defamation. One ISP employee in the audience added that the number of takedown notices issued is actually quite low, around one per fortnight, so it is quite easy to investigate each one. His ISP has a policy of only taking down sites if the notice has the weight of the law.
• The breakdown of anonymity, an important principle in the early days of the internet, points to a fundamental problem of the internet as public space – namely that the very digital nature of the space makes this contentious, as the web operates on privately-run networks and we leave traces of pretty much everything we do on it. With social websites such as Facebook, we’re putting personal data in the hands of Facebook who can then do anything they want with it. Rob Killick called for Facebook’s ownership of all your data on the site to be an opt-in.
• In relation to the global economic downturn, we need to recontextualise much of the discourse. When governments experience threats which they don’t know how to deal with, they tend to react with authoritarian measures. So trends towards regulation are likely to accelerate in the coming period. As individuals, we feel more isolated and individuated in these conditions, and are therefore more likely to take accepting positions of this authoritarianism. However, the deep nature of the recession we’re facing, and the absence of political solutions means that as a society we actually need more freedom to debate than less.
• Nearly everything can be said, but almost anything can be recorded and is keyword searchable. The gap between production and consumption is radically altered by the internet, and this has important consequences. Free speech hasn’t gone away with increased surveillance, but the conditions have changed.
• Tim Jordan talked about Torpark servers, a system accessible via Firefox designed to ensure anonymity on the web. Interestingly, they were impounded by Google during a recent paedophile investigation. Users of Torpark servers, which are located in Europe and the US, and were in fact designed by the US Navy and the Free Haven project, are perceived to be in authoritarian regimes. They are OS, and this raises very interesting questions – in theory the code is open to all of us, but in practical terms it’s only open to that small minority of people who can understand code. This is important in this context for determining whether there are any “back doors” i.e. ways in which users can be identified and reported. So the OS geek subculture offering an opposition to regulation is in fact not straightforward.
• The paradox of the web is that it is simultaneously outside control and under control – free speech and surveillance cohabit in cyberspace.
• Freedom of speech only means something if it’s offensive, and it is an absolute. I agreed with this, but not all panellists did.
• The difference between private speech and free speech has been eroded by the internet. We say all sorts of things in private that we may or may not really mean. But online this can be a problem. This is a very interesting dimension. At the moment, people tend to know that everything seems private whereas it is in fact recorded, but don’t really care. To an extent, of course, it doesn’t matter right now, but it may matter in the future if what you’re doing becomes politicised in some way.
• An interesting case is coming up in the UK, with the prosecution of a civil servant who wrote violent porn about what he’d like to do with Girls Aloud. This is a potentially groundbreaking case that will come up in 2009.
• An interesting debate arose around the issue of incitement. Rob Killick argued that incitement shouldn’t be a crime, although it now is one. So child rape is a crime, for example. If you see it, you should report it. But the act of seeing it should not be a crime. There are difficult issues around this – are people who are paying to see child rape actually colluding?