Free Expression Online

Amidst growing concern about the future independence of ICANN, the subcommittee of the U.S. Congress on Telecommunications and the Internet has expressed opposition to any move by the Commerce Department to alter its unilateral oversight of ICANN. Representative Edward J. Markey, the supposedly liberal Democrat from Massachusetts who chairs the Subcommittee, was joined by rightwing conservative Charles Pickering and 14 other members of the committee in the May 6 statement. The Congresspersons expressed their opposition to “any change that threatens the important U.S. role in promoting U.S. commercial and free speech principles on the Internet,” and implied that free speech principles would be threatened if NTIA “abandoned” its role “now or in the near future.”

The subcommittee members who drafted and signed this statement are badly misinformed – about ICANN, freedom of expression, NTIA oversight, and global Internet governance. We attempt here to set the record straight.

Thursday I spoke in Brussels at a well-attended seminar on “Net Neutrality and the [EU] Reform Proposals for the Electronic Communications Sector.” The event had a number of sponsors, including two Belgian Universities (Namur and Leuven) the ISP Association of Belgium and some consultancies. It appears that the neutrality norm for internet governance is becoming widely discussed in Europe and is influencing the European Commission's implementation of its sectoral reform efforts. Indeed there is a Principle proposed in Article 8 that end users should be able to access and distribute content and use the applications of their choice.

Chris Boam of Verizon was there and made some interesting comments. One was that Verizon has no interest in Deep Packet Inspection technologies and has rejected the idea of implementing them. The other was that Verizon's Open Development Initiative, which supposedly loosened up its vertical leverage over wireless handsets on its network, was “not a change in policy” but simply a re-packaging and more aggressive public promotion of its prior policy, which was that any handset manufacturer or developer could approach Verizon and be approved if they met some basic criteria. Hmmm…

The Council of Europe is pushing to extend the Cybercrime Convention to impose criminal sanctions on what it considers to be unacceptable forms of political or religious expression. The Cybercrime Convention was originally negotiated to respond to transnational problems such as theft of data, breaking into computers, computer-based financial fraud and the like. But now the Council is engaged in bulk unsolicited emails to promote the idea that web site content that is insulting or xenophobic is a cybercrime of the same order.

For some time it has been known that law enforcement authorities in Norway and Finland have prepared lists of alleged child pornography web sites, and demanded that local Internet service providers block access to them. This model of blocking access was avidly picked up by Internet law enforcement authorities in other countries, including the Netherlands, where pressure has been placed on ISPs to block these sites or risk being publicly smeared as aiding and abetting child abuse.

Using ISPs as intermediaries for censorship is a bad idea because mandated site blocking violates the principle of net neutrality. Truly illegal content should be handled by prosecuting the producers, publishers and hosts of the content rather than through attempts to block and control Internet access on a territorial basis. Governments, however, claim that they must block access because of the heinousness of child abuse and because the heinous sites were out of the reach of local law enforcement. Many people have bought that argument.

Until now. Recently, Finnish activists got their hands on the Finnish government's official list of blocked sites. The results of their discovery are astounding. Most of the censored sites are located either in the United States or EU countries — and thus are not outside the reach of child protection laws. Equally disturbing, most of the sites on the blocking list are not child pornography sites at all, but legal adult pornography sites. And many are not even porn sites at all.

Like Derrick (see prior post) I am in Rio at the UN’s Internet Governance Forum. Yesterday, IGP’s new paper on Net Neutrality as a global principle for Internet governance generated heated discussion when it was presented at the annual symposium of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet). One might think, with some justification, that the world doesn’t need another paper about net neutrality. But it is the global focus of this one that makes a difference. The GigaNet conference proved that the world is ready to discuss and explore this principle, and to analyze its implications for global Internet policy. Continue on to a list of some of the tough questions faced…

As a contribution to the 2007 UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), IGP has released a new paper showing how network neutrality can serve as a globally applicable principle to guide Internet governance. The paper defines network neutrality as the right of Internet users to access content, services and applications on...

[Abstract] Drafters: Milton MuellerConcurring: Derrick Cogburn, John Mathiason, Jeanette Hofmann As a contribution to the 2007 UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), IGP has released a new paper showing how network neutrality can serve as a globally applicable principle that can guide Internet governance. The paper defines network neutrality as the...