Abstract
Who will control the future of the internet?
For many digital and human rights activists, the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), held in Dubai in December 2012, was a global battle of the decade. On one side of the divide, Russia, China and Iran lobbied for greater government control and top-down regulation of the internet. On the other, EU countries and the US argued the internet should remain governed by an open and collaborative ‘multistakeholder’ approach. In this display of digital geopolitics, emerging democratic powers like Brazil and India split their allegiances between both camps. These dynamics led mainstream media to portray WCIT as a digital rehashing of the Cold War. While the summit did expose serious geopolitical divisions over digital freedom, the battle lines are still too blurred and the stakes too high for this simple analogy to go unchecked.
Contributing to the Cold War comparison is the fact that journalists, activists and politicians regularly use countries’ track records on internet freedom to draw artificial lines between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. Such simple dualism doesn’t exist in global politics, neither on the ground nor in cyberspace. Not only is this dichotomy inaccurate, it can prove harmful when states labelled ‘good’ produce bad policies that others use to justify repressing online freedoms.
‘Bad’ states like China and Iran do heavily filter, restrict, block and monitor their citizens’ internet access. They imprison bloggers for crossing red lines around offence. They shut down internet access to dampen political dissent. These states are among the worst offenders, but they’re far from alone.
Russia blocks websites and increasingly monitors its citizens’ internet usage. EU countries use a range of filters, takedown requests and monitoring to restrict digital freedoms at home, while US surveillance policies allow the government to spy on foreign nationals around the world. Europe and the US are still among the most positive global role models for freedom of expression, but are far from knights in shining armour for digital rights.
Legalisation of warrantless wiretaps on foreign intelligence targets means the US government can snoop on data from anywhere in the world
In democracies, transition states and even autocracies, the internet and digital technologies have opened new channels for communication and expression. Staggering growth rates mean that 100m people online 15 years ago are now 2.5bn today, a number that continues to rise as affordable smartphones connect remote communities for the first time. These new technologies can enhance free speech, but as the Arab Spring clearly demonstrated, they can also increase and encourage state surveillance and repression.
Emerging democratic powers like India and Brazil, sometimes called the ‘swing states’ of internet freedom for the great political influence they exert both in their respective regions and globally, are still determining whether to fall in line with open or repressive digital policies. The internet’s organic development as a virtual wild West with fluid frontiers is under fire by top-down governance proposals, which aim to give states more influence in determining its future. China, Iran and Russia are deliberately monitoring and censoring internet access. Europe and America are calling for a free and open internet while sometimes undermining these calls with policies that promote the opposite. And emerging democratic powers are falling to one side or the other. Which way these states ultimately swing on global internet governance will play a large part in determining the internet’s future.
The internet’s development as a virtual Wild West with fluid frontiers is under fire
China, Iran and Russia
Chinese internet censorship has been described as an onion, an overused but often effective metaphor for politics and society. Peeling back the layers of the great automated firewall, we see that web companies enforce vague and repressive regulations, an army of minions are paid to post positive propaganda and monitor countries in the region, and a pervasive culture of self-censorship is enhanced by a mandatory real-name registration system. Millions of people in China use virtual private networks to bypass this censorship, but with more than half a billion people online in the country, these millions represent a small fraction of users.
Iran’s censorship regime is less advanced than China’s but in many ways just as worrying. For years, Iran has threatened to introduce a national internet or ‘halal’ intranet to cut its citizens off from the world wide web. In March 2013, the government blocked most circumvention tools used to access Western news outlets and social media sites, moving Iran one step closer to a closed and decidedly unfree digital sphere.
Russia is less extreme than China and Iran but has enacted increasingly restrictive digital policies in recent months. A new law that claims to protect children requires internet service providers (ISPs) in Russia to block blacklisted websites that contain ‘harmful’ information, including child pornography, ‘extremist materials’ and information on suicide or drug use. To ensure compliance, Russia’s state security force is able to monitor all internet traffic in the country without court approval.
Blocking, censoring and surveillance efforts in these three powerful states is far more extreme and repressive than anything the US or EU states are likely to enact – or so we thought before revelations and allegations emerged in June 2013 that the US government is engaged in mass surveillance of its citizens and foreign nationals. While China, Iran and Russia hold understandable sway over smaller authoritarian regimes, they have also persuaded several emerging democratic powers to join them in some of their key arguments for global regulation of the internet.
The United States and European Union countries
The countries that most restrict citizens’ digital rights are not the only ones that negatively influence global internet freedoms. Some governments might look to China for its expert censoring and monitoring techniques, but few are eager to associate their political reputation with the state’s draconian laws. Emerging democratic powers are more likely to look to European and American policies on cybersecurity, surveillance, intellectual property and offence when setting their own laws on these issues. US and EU policies that restrict digital rights at home, therefore, can impact negatively on, and threaten, a free and open internet beyond these countries’ own borders.
ABOVE: Internet cafe, Taiyuan, Shanxi province, 31 March 2010. China’s Great Firewall is synonymous with online censorship the world over
Credit: Reuters
The First Amendment to the US Constitution theoretically prohibits laws that abridge free speech. This hasn’t stopped the US government from backing and enacting policies that increase its ability to monitor and intercept digital communications and chill online freedom of expression. The recent legalisation of warrantless wiretaps on foreign intelligence targets means the government can now snoop on data from anywhere in the world if processed on US servers or hosted on US websites. The recently revealed Prism programme, which allegedly allows the government to access the largest web companies’ servers to monitor users’ video calls, search histories and live chats, is even more alarming. Such overreaching policies and a slew of troubling acronyms (SOPA, PIPA, DMCA, ECPA, CISPA, CFAA – the list of intellectual property and national security acts goes on) negatively impact on digital freedom of expression in the US. Because the country is often portrayed and perceived as a beacon of freedom, they also set dangerous precedents abroad.
Despite these policies, Freedom House still placed the US just behind Estonia in its 2012 Freedom on the Net index and ranked all European Union member states as ‘free’. Some, like Hungary, heavily restrict online freedoms, but others are showing signs of improvement. The UK recently dropped support for a ‘Snooper’s Charter’ that would have included sweeping surveillance proposals, though revised measures around surveillance and cybercrime will likely be introduced later in 2013. There have been a worrying number of social media prosecutions in the UK, often for speech that is merely offensive. The Director of Public Prosecutions has issued new guidelines aiming to clarify and limit how prosecutors deal with online offence, but laws that allow this criminalisation are still on the statute book.
US and EU citizens might not enjoy full digital rights at home, but their governments do endorse and work towards maintaining a multistakeholder internet governance model on the global stage. Repressive cyber policies in China, Iran and Russia and these countries’ backing of top-down government regulations on the net put US and EU shortcomings into perspective.
Swing states
Looking beyond the G8 countries to the G20 major economies provides a clear profile of the emerging powers with the greatest ability to shift regional and global norms and policies on internet freedom.
Section 66a of India’s 2008 Information Technology Amendment Act makes it illegal to send ‘offensive messages’ that cause ‘annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, or ill will’. The India-based Centre for Internet and Society notes that much of the language in this section stems from a 1935 UK Post Office act, which is at the root of recent social media prosecutions in the UK – showing how precedents set by old laws can affect new societies.
In the past year, India increased state censorship and surveillance, held web companies liable for user content, shut down internet access in times of protest and arrested political bloggers. Yet India was one of the few countries to side with the EU and US at the WCIT summit in Dubai and endorse multistakeholderism.
Brazil, South Africa, Turkey and Indonesia, some of the most influential emerging democratic powers in the multipolar order, joined the likes of China, Iran and Russia in Dubai to vote new regulations into effect and give governments greater power over the internet.
Activists argued that WCIT would fundamentally determine the internet’s future. This looked possible in early December, but ultimately, proposed regulations were substantially diluted during the conference. Opponents of the final treaty (signed by 89 member states; 55 abstained) still worry that provisions around spam and security could be used to restrict internet freedoms when the regulations come into effect in 2015. More worrying than the final provisions is how states lined up to vote.
Brazil’s decision to sign the new treaty disappointed civil society groups that have looked to the country’s long-debated ‘Internet Bill of Rights’ as a positive legislative model for other countries to replicate. The draft bill, Marco Civil da Internet, aims to strengthen freedom of expression, net neutrality, and user privacy online. Thousands of people shaped its current form through collaborative online consultations.
Politicians and civil society hoped that Marco Civil would be the first Brazilian internet law, but, in November 2012, two bills criminalising some uses of security circumvention software were passed on the same day Marco Civil’s vote was postponed for a fourth time. Marco Civil was struck another blow when amendments around net neutrality and intermediary liability were introduced, with threatening implications for online freedom of expression.
The Dubai summit revealed the latest faultlines for global control and governance of the internet. Aside from India, influential emerging democratic powers overwhelmingly aligned with China and Russia, showing the critical juncture we’ve reached for the internet’s future. Brazil’s struggle to pass digital freedom measures at home suggests that some of the emerging democratic powers, just like the EU and US in some of their domestic measures, are wobbling on where to position themselves and how much to stand up for digital freedom.
Internet activists and hope on the horizon
Even with a watered-down WCIT behind us, the global internet governance debate is far from over. Important summits in the next two years will have real implications for one crucial question: who should control the internet?
A multistakeholder model for internet governance gives individuals a stake in its future. While WCIT shut citizens and civil society out of the process, the Internet Governance Forum, to be held in Bali in October 2013, and regional conferences around the world aim to give people a greater voice. Most netizens do not want governments or corporations to heavy-handedly censor or surreptitiously monitor their everyday interactions online. To curtail these threats, we must keep a close eye on the troubling policies shaping the global digital agenda.
There are silver linings: when civil society backed SOPA and PIPA protests in the US and ACTA rallies in Europe, it was seen as a positive sign for the bottom-up future of digital activism. Without it, states that favour greater government control of the internet could unite to replace multi-stakeholder internet governance with a multi-stateholder model that pushes civil society and everyday citizens to the fringes. With more than half the world yet to come online and billions more people set to do so in the next decade, the stakes have never been higher. If tomorrow’s netizens are to enjoy a free and open internet, established powers, notably the US and the EU, must start respecting digital freedom more at home if their support for that freedom globally is not to be undermined. And emerging democratic powers must swing away from the Russias and Chinas of the world towards online freedom.