THE FRAGILE NET
WHY WE NEED INTERNET NEUTRALITY
BY
MARTIN
QUINN
Independent information allows us to be responsible, fully involved global citizens
PROTOCOL-MAGAZINE
Tim Berners-Lee is one of the great minds credited with
helping to invent the internet as we know it. He is also the
founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, an
organization which seeks to keep the Web ‘available,
usable, and valuable for everyone’. The Web Foundation’s
page accurately describes the limited availability of the web,
and seeks to furthermore establish the Web as a ‘global
public good and a basic right’. Many people would
consider the internet to be a superfluous innovation which,
while it has made countless lives easier and access to
information hugely more convenient, is not so fundamental
that it should be considered a ‘right’. What the internet
represents is access to information, and through that the
ability to make independently informed decisions about
political, social, and cultural issues.
Access to independent information is what allows us to be
responsible and fully involved domestic and global citizens.
Without it, we are forced to be dependent on the ‘official’
sources which are charged with keeping the public opinion
swaying in a certain direction. The internet, however, has
made it difficult for governments to be able to fully control
the flow of information; yet, many still try to do so with
varying degrees of success. China is a central example of
this phenomenon. The Chinese government manages to
restrict the flow of information to its constituents quite well
through what is widely known as ‘the great Chinese
firewall’, which filters out information which the Beijing
government determines to be too controversial for the
general public.
This filtration system is much more
sophisticated than a standard block-all method of
censorship however, and allows bits of potentially
inflammatory information through to the general public,
following a ‘first censor, then publish’ course of action as
reported by Perry Link in this July NY Times blogpost. This
means publishing information in the back pages and ‘under
small headlines’ to mitigate exposure rather than just
denying it.
11
It appears that China may be taking new, harsher steps
towards complete censorship of the internet. According to
an article in The Daily Dot, there are new rules in place
which make it illegal to publish and spread anything
considered an ‘online rumor’, a purposefully vague term
which is open to wide interpretation by the authorities. This
makes it much riskier for social media users in China to
share and re-post stories which they may find interesting,
but which the government finds potentially threatening.
Such a stranglehold on available information takes away the
possibility for Chinese internet users to vet and judge
information for themselves. While the new law does protect
responsible companies from malicious, viral lies that may
hurt business, the wide scope of the law makes it difficult
for bloggers to share any stories that might be at all critical
of large firms or government agencies.
Governments are not the only entities interested in
restricting internet access for the general public. The
American telecommunications giant Verizon has filed a case
with a federal appeals court against the FCC to appeal the
2010 Open Internet Order. The Open Internet Order ‘aims
to prevent Internet service providers…from interfering with
Internet traffic or favouring their own services’ and as such,
preserve a network of free access and content for all internet
users to enjoy. Verizon wants to change that by picking and
choosing which bits of content it wants to speed up and
which bits it wants to slow down, giving premium speed
and access to its own conte