As the FCC convenes its hearing today in Cambridge to address Comcast’s degradation of BitTorrent packets, two other blocking/filtering stories are playing out.
First, the Pakistan government (probably nudged by President Musharraf, who heard that some YouTube videos are critical of him) ordered that YouTube be blocked. An over-zealous ISP owned by the state sent out a redirect for YouTube’s IP address to some other more suitable site. But that redirect was somehow propagated all over the world – removing YouTube from view for everyone.
Second, the infamous Clean Feed approach is under attack. A Finnish programmer published the government’s domain blacklist in order to prove that the system is being abused.
You can’t tell who’s on the list, why they’re there, or what the process is for getting off, and ISPs are supposed to block the sites on the list. Sites with many pages are blocked as a whole, even though only a small portion of the site is arguably unlawful (as in Wikileaks).
It’s the meta-issue: under what circumstances should ISPs be used as private police to block or filter sites? What’s “reasonable network management”? How much should users know about what’s going on? How do we manage the spillover effects of all this filtering, which can be quite harmful to overall social interests?
This isn’t just about the future of the First Amendment. It’s the future of the internet.
Shouldn’t that be the other way around? “This isn’t just about the future of the Internet. It’s the future of the First Amendment.”
Well, the First Amendment doesn’t operate globally. This is about the global, interoperable ability to communicate freely.
The problem is there are some bad people out there and when ICANN tries to put in place measures to prevent bad things from spreading like wildfire the lawyers and the academics scream restraint of trade. Perhaps sometimes the idealists should realise that some of the bad actors will push the limits of the envelope no matter where it is set and if ICANN fails to act governments will; albeit in a much more heavy handed manor and with a lot of collateral damage.
I personally am not interested in performing censorship on behalf of governments, fwiw.
I think most people agree filtering/censorship is something that should be avoided if at all possible.
I believe a lot of the concerns of both individuals and governments can be removed through good framework design principles which in turn will remove much of the momentum for increased filtering/censorship.
The existing namespace
For freedom of expression to be pervasive there needs to be responsibility and when that responsibility is abused there needs to be accountability.
Not all registrars are created equal and it is their differing approaches which seriously weakens the accountability framework ICANN has put in place.
Extending the namespace
Additions to the namespace need to be very carefully managed. Using .xxx as an illustrative example – .xxx by definition draws two arbitrary boundaries; what’s not titillating enough and what’s too extreme even for .xxx.
Problems arise because every individual has strongly held beliefs of where they personally feel those two boundaries should be drawn, and worse many feel their personal view should be the one everyone else should use.
The fact that such passions are so strongly held makes it very easy for some law makers to justify filtering whole TLDs on the grounds of public interest thereby, with a single stoke of a pen, censoring 10,000s of sites and at the same time destroying the universality of the internet. Further once that censorship boundary is crossed the next time it going to be even easier for less contentious gTLDs. What about .gay or .jew or a ccTLD of another country even?
Even for non contentious new gTLDs merely replicating the current system is going to put immense pressure on the existing ICANN framework as the relationships between the new registries, registrars and registrants become increasing blurred, making accountability for practical purposes at times virtually non existent.
All of which could provide a public mandate for censorship on a level hitherto unseen.