Content area
Full Text
Leading liberal democracies such as the United States have begun promoting "Internet freedom" and, by extension, opposing "Internet control." But what exactly is this control, and how best may it be combated? As a category, it is broad, encompassing both censorship (which violates the right to free expression) and surveillance (which violates the right to privacy). This dual character of control explains why it is often so hard to assess innovations such as social networking in the abstract: They work in favor of freedom of expression by making it easier for us to express ourselves, but at the same time they also tend to work in favor of surveillance by making more of our private information public.
In addition to its ability to manifest itself as both censorship and surveillance, "Internet control" has a technological dimension and a sociopolitical dimension that often overlap in practice even though they are analytically distinct from each other. A good example of the technological control would be a national-level scheme in which government- sanctioned Internet filters automatically banned access to all sites whose URLs contained certain sensitive keywords. A good example of sociopolitical control would be a law that treated blogging platforms such as WordPress or LiveJournal as mass-media organs and made them screen all user-submitted online content prior to publication. In the former case, a government would be using technology to chill the freedom of expression directly; in the latter case, the sought-after effect would be the same, but would be indirect and mediated through the power of law rather than sought through the direct application of technology alone.
Most talk of "liberation technologies" as ways of weakening "Internet control" turns out to be about the technological rather than the sociopolitical dimension. But what if success in that area is met with larger and more sophisticated efforts at exerting sociopolitical control? Scholars still know little about the factors that influence the dynamics and the distribution of the two kinds of control. As technological methods lose efficacy, sociopolitical methods could simply overtake them: An authoritarian government might find it harder to censor blogs, but still rather easy to jail bloggers. Indeed, if censorship becomes infeasible, imprisonment may become inevitable.
Thus, if the technological dimension of Internet control were one...