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Reporters Without Borders have released a list of the top 13 “enemies of the internet”, a list of countries which aims to draw attention to those who suppress freedom of speech and expression on the internet.

Unsurprisingly, China and North Korea are on the list along with various others including Egypt who allegedly arrested three bloggers in June, not that I don’t trust RSF its just that I can’t find any major references anywhere else! This isn’t by any means the first time RSF have released the list but the first time they have included an online petition of sorts which also contains an attack on Yahoo for their involvement in censorship in China, quite surprising they didn’t go after Google in the same manner during this online protest after Google restricted searches within the communist state.

Freedom of Speech on the internet seems to have become a particularly big topic in recent months, Amnesty International launched the Irrepressible.info campaign a while ago which shares many of the same ideals as the RSF campaign but in a broader sense. The UN Internet Bill of Rights workshop for which the amnesty campaign was aimed at, took place in athens recently and reading from the workshops wiki, it aims to address:

• What rights are fundamental to freedom in a digital world?
• What obligations are necessary to create a digital society based on rule of law and civil liberty?
• Who are the appropriate stake-holders in making policy determinations for the Internet and what is the role of government?
• How to negotiate between conflicting values in setting policy for the online environment?
• What special challenges and opportunities does the Internet provide in the quest for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

It will be very interesting to see what the final document contains, the wiki makes for some interesting reading on what has already been done. Notably this was a topic raised in France as early as 1998 as a issue for discussion, and brought up by others in various forms earlier still. The United Nations is a large organisation with many of the worlds major powers involved heavily in it. In the same way that the League of Nations, the UN’s predecessor went, the influence of the UN has arguably been diminished in recent years most prominently through the coalition invasion of Iraq. Is the publication of an Internet bill of Rights going to have any noticeable impact on the internets standing within individual world states. As the prime example: both online and diplomatic pressure have not yielded any major results with China over large scale censorship of the internet, and companies such as Google who by their motto should known better have been keen to boost their share prices through cooperation with China on this point. There is also have the issue of where to draw the line, where does the bill fit in and how much governance should it contain?

We all have very different ideas on what should be allowed on the internet, in the UK recently Channel 4 aired ‘Dispatches Debate - Muslims and Free Speech’. This has been described as “sensationalist” in some places and others have gone further and I would agree with points raised that the audience selected did not reflect the average british ethnic percentages, so creating a potential bias in the audience poll results. Anyway, I digress, the key point I saw throughout was that different people had as can be expected different views on what is and what isn’t offensive, Jon Snow presenting summed up at the end by saying “The freedom not to be offended should be enjoyed by allâ€�. As was the case here the same is true for the internet, who gets to decide what is and what isn’t offensive, what is and what isn’t permitted on the internet. Whilst any decent person will say that child pornography for example should not be permitted, there are not many other examples of where a clear line can be drawn. China for one will of course not share the same views held by western democratic nations.

Iif we cannot find common international ground on what is and what isn’t a persons right offline, how can we find it online without dividing up the internet?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 1:37 am and is filed under Internet, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.