Censorship Threats for the Internet

Singapore.
And we're in the closing plenary of ICA 2010, which (appropriately for a conference in Singapore, perhaps) deals with the impact of new media on censorship. Censorship approaches and technologies in the Asia-Pacific region vary widely, of course, as plenary chair Cherian George notes (from brute force to sophisticated social sanctioning).

Ang Peng Hwa is the first of the plenary speakers, and he begins by stating that the rise of Internet censorship in Asia was inevitable. Contrary to previous claims, the Internet can be censored - for example, by blocking particular IP addresses; further, the control of authoritative root services online is in the hands of ICANN, and ICANN itself is far from independent from government influence, but instead is subject to substantial US government control. As one example, Peng Hwa notes the arrest of the then holders of the .iq country-code top-level domain in December 2002, some months before the US operation Iraqi Freedom, leading to a change of control over .iq - hence, there is an urgent need to look more closely at Internet governance.

Western countries also censor the Internet: France and Germany both block access to information about Nazi memorabilia, for example (or have made search engines like Yahoo.fr block relevant search results); this creates conflicts in the US between the strong Jewish lobby support for free expression advocacy groups and the interest of the same lobby in combatting Nazism.

Laws giving jurisdiction the ability to prosecute computer hackers anywhere in the world if the packets used to hack computers passed through routers anywhere in the nation's territory have been passed by the US; it also has ratified a treaty enabling it to prosecute 'cybercrimes' carried out in the territory of any treaty member. Also in the US, there have been legislative efforts attempting to give the US President access to an 'Internet kill switch' that would shut down Net access for the rest of the world.

So, technology enables censorship; Western liberal countries are doing it; and there is a tendency to pull back from the globalisation of communication and the electronic media - this is a significant threat.

Technorati : ICA 2010, ICANN, Internet, censorship, free speech, legislation, politics
Del.icio.us : ICA 2010, ICANN, Internet, censorship, free speech, legislation, politics