It’s a funny thing this business of internet freedom. Because the net is so profoundly empowering and anonymous it feeds into an individual’s right to freedom of expression.
For instance, it makes millions of mild-mannered stamp-collecting geeks roar with the rage of ideologues and turns hitherto well-brought up kids into expletive-spewing monsters.
On a bad day the net can and has been an assemblage of mean-spirited bigots, cruel bullies, misguided propagandists, rabid communalists and dirty-minded perverts.
And that the net is neither free nor fair is a lesson in progress, as we learn more about the sale or sharing of information by governments and private companies, and the insidious process of trolling by lobby groups with vested interests.
Listening to Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Hague (interestingly, sponsored by Google) this week and hearing her talk of the move of repressive states to ‘build borders in cyberspace’, I wondered if it had escaped her attention that as much as we like to believe that the internet transcends all geographies and is a heavenly cloud of liberty and brotherhood that hovers magnificently above us all, it is in fact a collection of businesses with postal addresses, owned and managed by private companies, most of which — ones that count at least — happen to be located in the United States of America.
What does it mean to have the secretary of state of USA deliver a resounding and much applauded speech in favour of internet freedom in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings. And also in the same week that Putin has come out strongly against what he sees as America’s fanning of oppositional sentiment via Facebook?
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If repressive states regard the internet as a threat and try and subvert it in one scenario, is it unimaginable that their more sophisticated counterparts manipulate it to achieve their ends in other scenarios? And all this under the halo of human rights and freedom of expression?
The internet is fast becoming more than an amalgamation of toe-curling quotidian expression and a place to post your latest summer vacation snaps. Its size, reach, immediacy and so far unregulated qualities have made it a powerful tool in the hands of those who can bend it to their will.
That the most powerful of its arms are American owned should not be overlooked. How long before it will be regulated by the very people who for all ostensible practices are champions of its freedom?
If the American state were to be at the receiving end of the same kind of oppositional forces on social networks, as witnessed in say the Arab Spring, would it be as pious about internet freedom as it is now?
Of course Kapil Sibal is wrong to call in representatives of Facebook and Twitter and Google and throw the book at them.
And it goes without saying that all of us who value the net and what it means to us have a duty to rally against him and any attempt by the government to curtail our freedom of expression.
But buying in to the theory that the internet is, even as it exists now, free of vested interests is naïve. And believing that America is a champion of its activists and believes in their freedom is foolish.
It’s a little more complicated than that. Don’t believe me? Ask Julian Assange.
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writermalavikasangghvi@hotmail.com