Has Article 19 abandoned Article 19?

Two staffers at Article 19 Digital have declared that the AWS outage is a “democratic failure.” On its face, this is a really weird argument. What failed, exactly, other than Amazon’s DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1? How can a technical outage be a failure of democratic political institutions? Was there an election where candidates Uptime and Downtime were on the ballot, and Uptime lost? Did I miss voting in that one?

Seriously, why is Article 19 Digital straining so hard to link cloud outages to the survival of free speech and democracy? Answering that question tells you more about today’s Article 19 than anything meaningful about freedom of expression online. Read on.

If you read the document after which this NGO is named, Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is exclusively about the right of individuals to communicate. It enshrines the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” And indeed, the Article 19 NGO was once one of the most principled defenders of that right in the global arena.

This article shows a change of direction that should worry civil libertarians.

Let’s begin with the simple fact that a cloud outage has nothing to do with free speech rights and democracy. It means some websites and services are offline for a few hours. No person or group was attacking specific points of view; the outage was content neutral, as we say in U.S. First Amendment law. If I buy a newspaper subscription and the delivery boy misses my house one day, that’s not suppression of my Article 19 rights, much less a “democratic failure.” It’s a delivery failure. If a hurricane disables the electrical lines near my home, that’s bad for a number of reasons, not all of them about my freedom of speech, but while such a disaster temporarily limits my ability to communicate (and perhaps eat), my political rights and my system of government have not changed. No one is actively and intentionally suppressing my right to say what I like, run for office or vote. If the government orders an Internet (or electrical) shutdown, on the other hand, that’s a free speech issue. Free speech is a political right that pertains to the relationship between the individual and the state. It offers formal legal protection to journalists, authors, social media users, podcasters, and anyone else from political interference with their creative output and communications. Technical outages and natural disasters disrupt speech, yes, but in ways that do not target a particular viewpoint. And after a while they end. You can pass laws against hurricanes and technical failures, but we will still have them.

I make that argument above even though I know that Cath-Speth’s and Le’s pitch is not really about a threat to free speech. For them, free speech Is just a rhetorical bridge to an anti-corporate economic policy position. The economic argument is that Big Tech is the problem. It is too concentrated and that makes the Internet less resilient.

We can have a rational debate about whether the Internet services industries (note the plural) are too concentrated. Reasonable people could say that they are, but could also say Internet services are highly distributed and competitive. Such a debate would have to recognize the enormous economies of scale and scope that are present in cloud computing and the broader digital ecosystem. It would also have to recognize that connecting the world by means of a highly diverse set of software applications running on a highly distributed set of data centers across multiple networks owned and operated by thousands of independent entities, in a market spanning multiple jurisdictions, is going to have breakdowns and fails here and there. A reasonable discussion of this problem would recognize that the decentralization of services and wide distribution of decision making authority might share some of the responsibility for the instability. But the fault may just be with AWS – maybe they are too big. If they are, however, we have quite a few alternatives. Maybe market actors should distribute their loads. As big as they are, the cloud providers are not monopolies, not even close; there are at least a dozen of them worldwide, and many organizations run their own cloud (though probably more should). If one understands the massive digital resource allocations required to have a globally interoperable Internet distributing petabytes of messages and videos to billions of people 24/7, it seems likely that some resources need to be concentrated in some places for the system to run efficiently and meet users’ needs. Concentration is neither all bad, nor an unmitigated good. In a competitive market, which cloud really is, economies of scale matter, and those economies make consumer access to storage and applications better in some ways, but they can also make systemic risks greater.

Unfortunately, Cath-Speth and Lu are not really that interested in the finer points of cloud resilience and functionality, either. Resilience is just the hook for a far more ideological, covertly anti-capitalist policy agenda. Article 19 Digital’s target is not censorship anymore, it’s the market economy. Presenting a system failure by one operator at one time as a raging threat to our freedoms is a form of scapegoating meant to advance an ideological opposition to commercial cloud providers, or commercial anything. As they say, “projects built on principles of openness, decentralization, and digital sovereignty—from open-source collaboration platforms to non-profit secure messaging services—all go dark the moment their commercial cloud provider experiences an outage.” The solution, they imply, is not to minimize outages or to find more reliable hosts, but to get rid of commercial cloud providers altogether. Apparently, these systems would not fail if Europe built an “alternative, distributed cloud infrastructure” and/or if they were run by (unspecified) “public cooperatives” and “experimental alternatives.” One wonders whether the policy wizards at Article 19 have ever had the pleasure of patronizing a large-scale information system run by a public cooperative.

Article 19 Digital now believes the market, not the state, is the primary threat to freedom of information. This is so because “When AWS or other cloud behemoths, like Google and Microsoft, are down, so is the rest of the internet.” They don’t ask whether other providers are more reliable. They grudgingly admit that the outage was unintentional, but insist that these companies could and would do it intentionally. They lose sight of the fact that the cloud providers are market actors and don’t want to lose money. This technical failure is going to cost Amazon billions of dollars and lose many customers. Yet the Article 19 staffers are claiming that private commercial cloud providers would willingly destroy their market by using “unilateral power over how we access information.” (Presumably this “unilateral power” would have to be coordinated collectively because none of them controls the entire system.) But those commercial cloud providers are just itching to do that, can’t you tell? In an odd aside, Cath-Speth writes “They are not afraid to leverage that power for content moderation” and links to one of her own articles criticizing CloudFlare for NOT pulling the plug on right wing websites. So she wants the chokepoints to control speech, I guess, just in the right way.

What bothered me the most about this post was the authors’ attempt to tie these economic policy arguments to “freedom of speech.” If Article 19 still actually cares about freedom of speech, they would not be jumping opportunistically on a cloud outage incident and ranking it threat #1. They would instead be decrying Internet shutdowns in numerous countries, challenging censorship in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia, putting pressure on the ironclad grip of the Communist Party of China on that country’s media and people, calling for the release of Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong. They could be asking why 30 people are being arrested daily in the UK for something they wrote on social media. They could be talking about the forced takeover of TikTok and its sale to a friend of Trump, a “trusted security advisor,” who will reprogram the app’s content recommendation algorithm. They could be protesting the Trump administration’s surveillance of visa applicants’ social media accounts to decide whether to let them into the country. They might be concerned with the arrest and deportation of U.S. visitors for speaking out against the indiscriminate destruction of Gaza. There are in fact so many threats to freedom of speech going on right now, in so many places, one would think Article 19 Digital would be really busy with them. But no, they focus on an outage.

One of the most distressing trends of our time is the abandonment of free speech principles by both the nationalist right and the progressive Left. The Left wants to control and censor speech in order to control market choices, to enact identity politics, impose their social norms or to suppress rightwing speech. The Right wants to control and censor speech so as to counteract the “woke mind-virus” and attacks the Soros Foundation, late night TV hosts and universities. The world needs consistent, principled free speech defenders right now, people not co-opted by the polarized environment. To see Article 19 abandon that mission is truly depressing.

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