On October 6th, 2012, The Economist posted an article considering how internet companies manage free speech issues in a cyberspace still heavily influenced by nation-states. If you remember about a week back, we posted an article about how a Brazilian court issued an arrest warrant for Google’s top exec for Brazil. The reason? Google refused to take down a YouTube video that breached Brazilian law. The ultimate point was that even though an internet company based in the U.S. may defend free speech, when that company operates in a nation-states that disagrees, the nation-state can reach out and affect the company’s conduct. With regards to Goldsmith & Wu’s Who Controls the Internet: Illusions of a Borderless World, this is an example of how the Internet has not necessarily “liberate[d] us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves.”
The Economist article picked up on that theme and noted that even though Google refused to take down the Brazilian video, it did block users in eight countries from watching The Innocence of Muslims. Moreover, “Google revealed that 45 countries had asked it to block content in the last six months of 2011, up from only four in 2002.”
Another interesting twist on the issue is user policies for individual web sites. Most of these user policies ban obscenity, trolling, hate speech, etc, and don’t really inhibit the discussion. However, the article noted that “overzealous moderation can have ‘absurd and censorious’ results.” One solution is to have site users resolve the issues among themselves in a committee structure.
Whatever the case, the internet is not as free as we think. “[I]nternet firms will never please everyone. But good laws [would] at least point them in the right direction.”
Check out the rest of The Economist article here.
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