Articles on Internet Regulation and Control
There was a deluge of relevant news midweek, and I thought I’d quickly share some.
Both CNN and others, including CQ (subscription required), reported on the House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman claims today that Yahoo! “misled Congress regarding information the Internet company gave to Chinese authorities about the journalist Shi Tao”. A hearing will be held next month to determine if, during a February 2006 hearing, executives of the online firm lied to Congress about its cooperation with the Chinese government regarding the online activity of the journalist.
Shi Tao had posted on the Internet under a pseudonym about a crackdown by the government, and was later arrested. Yahoo “gave Chinese authorities information about his e-mail account, his computer address, his log-on history and the contents of several weeks of his e-mail, Lantos said.” Yahoo officials dispute these allegations. They are also being sued by Shi Tao in civil court. It will be interesting to see how this hearing, and case, play out (at least one Republican is noted criticizing Yahoo’s underlying policies that led to the info sharing with Chinese secret police). It is also a curious angle on the course reading, as it now appears that a firm is caught in the middle, having been coopted by one government to control and regulate the Internet, and now running afoul of another government, at least in part, for doing so (Congress certainly is nonplussed about having been lied to, but is intent on examining the underlying Yahoo info sharing policy as well).
Similarly, the Washington Post (“Crackdowns On Bloggers Increasing, Survey Finds”) reports on press freedom and increasing controls over blogging, according to a report from Reporters Without Borders. “”Countries that were not sentencing journalists to prison terms anymore have been doing it these last months for bloggers. This is the case in Egypt and Jordan,” the RPF Director is quoted. North Korea, Eritrea and Turkmenistan make the bottom of the list, while Iceland is tops for press freedom.
Finally, returning to the net neutrality debate conversation from a few weeks ago, the Post also carries an Op Ed written by the otherwise diametrically opposed leaders of NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Christian Coalition of America. The topic: Verizon’s nascent effort to censor NARAL’s text messaging, which it quickly relented on. Not much commentary is needed - the two basically take the telecom firm to task for corporate censorship:
When it comes to censoring free speech, sorry just isn’t good enough. Whatever your political views — conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, pro-choice or pro-life — it shouldn’t be up to Verizon to determine whether you receive the information you requested. Why should any company decide what you choose to say or do over your phone, your computer or your BlackBerry? Technologies are converging in our communications system, but the principles of free expression and the rights of all Americans to speak without intervention should remain paramount.
They go on to note that both organizations, and many others, are seeking to increase awareness of tech discrimination and its potential impacts on their advocacy efforts, and call on Congress for hearings on these issues. That may be a welcome return to the net neutrality debate, smartly taken out of the corp v. corp framework, and to now include otherwise focused members of civil society in the equation. I also share their closing, as I found the analogy appropos:
If corporations can’t tell Americans what to say on a phone call, they shouldn’t be able to control content or tell us what to say in a text message, an e-mail or anywhere else.