Clearing out the app stores: Government censorship made easier

There’s a new form of digital censorship sweeping the globe, and it could be the start of something devastating.

In the last few weeks, the Chinese government compelled Apple to remove New York Times apps from the Chinese version of the App Store. Then the Russian government had Apple and Google pull the app for LinkedIn, the professional social network, after the network declined to relocate its data on Russian citizens to servers in that country. Finally, last week, a Chinese regulator asked app stores operating in the country to register with the government, an apparent precursor to wider restrictions on app marketplaces.

These moves may sound incremental, and perhaps not immediately alarming. China has been restricting the web forever, and Russia is no bastion of free speech. So what’s so dangerous about blocking apps?

Here’s the thing: It’s a more effective form of censorship.

Blocking a website is like trying to stop lots of trucks from delivering a banned book; it requires an infrastructure of technical tools (things like China’s “Great Firewall”), and enterprising users can often find a way around it. Banning an app from an app store, by contrast, is like shutting down the printing press before the book is ever published. If the app isn’t in a country’s app store, it effectively doesn’t exist. The censorship is nearly total and inescapable.

But that’s not the end of this story. The banning of apps highlights a deeper flaw in our modern communications architecture: It’s the centralisation of information, stupid.

“I think the app store censorship issue is one layer of ice on the surface of the iceberg above the waterline,” said Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia Law School and a leader in the free software movement of activists who have long been warning about the dangers of centrally managed, commercial software.

For more than a decade, we users of digital devices have actively championed an online infrastructure that now looks uniquely vulnerable to the sanctions of despots and others who seek to control information. We flocked to smartphones, app stores, social networks and cloud storage. Publishers like The New York Times are investing in apps and content posted to social networks instead of the comparatively open World Wide Web. Some start-ups now rely exclusively on apps; Snapchat, for instance, exists only as a mobile app.

Compared with older forms of distributing software, apps downloaded from app stores are more convenient for users and often more secure from malware, and they can be more lucrative for creators. But like so much else online now, they risk feeding into mechanisms of central control. In most countries, the Apple and Google app stores are the only places to find apps for devices running their respective operating systems. (There are more choices for Android app stores in China, where Google does not offer its store.)

The internet’s earliest boosters considered it a magical tool to liberate people from restrictions on speech. The easy banning of apps suggests that if we let it, the internet could instead become something quite the opposite — one of the most efficient choke points of communication the world has ever seen.

This was not how it was supposed to be. Decentralised communications was once a central promise of the internet. In the 1960s and 1970s, with the world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon, a cadre of academic and military engineers set out to create a communications system that contained no single point of failure or control. The network they came up with, which evolved into the modern internet, connected every machine to every other through many different paths. That way, if any portion of the network were wiped out by an attack, traffic would simply route itself to a new path.

As the threat of nuclear attack diminished and the internet grew, its decentralised design became as much a political selling point as a technical one.

“Ours is the world that is both everywhere and nowhere,” the activist John Perry Barlow argued in his 1996 manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” He predicted that because of the internet’s everywhere-ness, the world’s governments would never be able to lasso the digital realm. The computer scientist and activist John Gilmore told Time magazine in 1993, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” What the creators and early proselytisers of the internet did not foresee was the rapid commercialisation of the network. The internet that Barlow and Gilmore envisioned was built and maintained by collectives of users; the one that users flocked to was tamed by companies whose very success turned them into some of the largest corporations on the planet.

© 2017 The New York Times News Service