Who's in Control? 1

Having completed the second part of Who Controls the Internet, section title “The Government Strikes Back,” whoops, “Government Strikes Back” (the third section is unfortunately not titled “Return of the Free Network”), I am ready to begin talking about it.

There is a recurring theme, in this section at least, which is emphasized by the two authors and which looks like a good place to begin threading in current net neutrality questions: “a government’s failure to crack down on certain types of Internet communication ultimately reflects a failure of interest or will, not of power.”1

    They set the Internet in a larger timeline of advances in communication technology which at first encounter seemed above the law’s national borders but were eventually placed into each nation-state’s legal system, accordingly.

    “When a revolutionary technology first enters the public realm, it emboldens outlaws and seems immune from government control... eventually, the commercialization of the new technology needed to make it available to the masses fuels demand for property rights and government-enforced rules. After an initial period of uncertainty, the government responds to business and consumer demand to assert the control over the new technology needed to make it widely available.”2

This is raised as an important point because it causes us to consider why it is that the Internet in the United States does not function like the Internet in China. What does Who Controls the Internet? have to say about this? I’ll give you a hint: they say it’s not because we don’t have the technology, or time, or money to do so. It’s because our government negotiates the legality of new technologies in the light of the ideological importance of free speech, artistic expression, and entrepreneurial innovation in the United States.
    Let me move to another point in order to elaborate.

Perhaps the other most important point Who Controls the Internet makes is that many of us still conceptualize the Internet as a borderless communication medium, but that ideology has been debunked this past decade, through a series of court rulings and structural adjustments. Authors like Thomas Friedman have continued to push the idea that the web will erase national boundaries--citizens cannot be sheltered from complete accessibility to the ideas, laws, and cultures of other countries (oh, and the west will rule!). The only way to prevent this is to refuse to develop an Internet system and fall behind technologically.   Friedman, as quoted by Goldsmith & Wu: “What makes the Internet so dangerous for police states is that they can’t afford not to have it, because they will fall behind economically if they do. But if they have it, it means they simply cannot control information the way they once did.”3    

    The reality, counter Goldsmith and Wu, is that the Internet is not a magical place divorced from the reality of the physical world, but is composed of a network of hardware (i.e. cables, PCs, etc.) and relay points (e.g. ISPs) which make up a horde of intermediaries between the sources of information, goods, etc., and their individual targets. If an activity taking place on the Internet is brought to the government’s attention and deemed illegal, people at these intermediary points can be held responsible. This is largely effective, even when the source material is located offshore, out of the reach of a State, or when the individual targets are too numerous or difficult to find.

Who Controls the Internet? addresses China’s Internet policies, exclusively for a chapter,

and here the Internet as an unstoppable-force-above-the-State! is disproven. China, we learn, has both effective control over their net and a more advanced network than the US. They accomplish this with a combination of methods: security firewalls that filter access, according to a list of banned sites garnered by the Internet Police, at router checkpoints or information “gateways” into China4 (“John Gilmore’s idea... that ‘the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it’ is thus reversed: the router itself has become the censor”5); internal control via compliant companies (Yahoo China employs human & software filters on words like “democracy” in their chatrooms); identification and arrest of individuals creating or accessing illegal content (and they countered the anonymity of Wi-Fi with WAPI, which I will get into at a later date).
   

This isn’t the most complete list, but it’s a good start for conveying the effectiveness of their system. This is the nasty side of government control, and probably the kind people think of when phrases like “American voters want the government to keep its hands off their Internet”6 pop up in blogs and news articles. It is also likely to be alluded to by telecommunications providers like Verizon when they claim that the FCC is over-regulating or overstepping boundaries of control: “We believe this assertion of authority goes well beyond any authority provided by Congress, and creates uncertainty for the communications industry, innovators, investors and consumers.”7

    Don’t be fooled. Verizon is the one that has been trying to filter sites like BitTorrent. Do you believe that BitTorrent runs on an illegal business model, because it encourages illegal filesharing of copywrited material? Well, if you do, to whom do you want to give the ability to make and enforce that decision?  Do we believe the bit about our government’s responsibility to the ideological importance of free speech, artistic expression, and entrepreneurial innovation?  Our government is supposed to act on our behalf and has systems in place (I know, supposedly) to do so. What about a corporation? If we limit their legal obligations to our government via the FCC, whom are they responsible to other than--yes, I’m going to say it--their own bottom line?  





i Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) 89.
2 124.
3 101.
4 93.
5 94.
6 “Go Figure: 21 Percent of Americans Oppose FCC Internet Regulation.” By Stuart Fox,             TechNewDaily, 30 December 2010.  
<http://www.technewsdaily.com/most-americans-oppose-fcc-internet-regulation-1890>
7 “Verizon Sues F.C.C. to Overturn Order on Blocking Web Sites.” By Edward Wyatt, January 20,         2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/business/media/21fcc.html>