internet freedom – Techdirt (original) (raw)

More States Get Dumb, Introduce Laws Requiring ID Verification To Access Porn

from the please-apply-for-your-access-to-porn-license dept

There’s no reason anyone should look to Louisiana for legislative leadership. The state still has an oft-abused criminal defamation law on the books in 2023 — the sort of law that would have looked out of place a century ago.

I guess you can be on the cutting edge when your legislative moves appeal to backwards people. A new wave of moral panic is upon us, led by legislators who think they can cleanse the world by cleaning up the internet. Since the internet remains out of reach, a moral minority clad in legislative clothing has arisen, determined to limit everyone’s access to pornography by forcing sites to collect identifying information from site visitors.

The Louisiana law that took effect at the beginning of this year mandated ID verification by any site hosting “at least 33.3% pornography.” How this percentage would be determined was a problem left to the governed to sort out. The implementation of the law resulted in some compliance, with PornHub demanding info from visitors with Louisiana IP addresses. Other sites simply refused access. One-third-or-greater porn sites were steered towards using the state’s in-house ID verification app — LA Wallet — to verify users’ ages.

Copycat legislation is now popping up elsewhere in the country, as Ashley Belanger reports for Ars Technica.

Last month, Louisiana became the first state to require an ID from residents to access pornography online. Since then, seven states have rushed to follow in Louisiana’s footsteps. According to a tracker from Free Speech Coalition, Florida, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia introduced similar laws, and laws in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Virginia are seemingly closest to passing. If passed, some of these laws could be enforced promptly, while some bills in states like Florida and Mississippi specify that they wouldn’t take effect until July.

Not great news for internet freedom. And, despite what legislators might say in support of these bills, these are designed to limit everyone’s access to pornography. The proposals may state concern for minors accessing sexual material, but the intent is to add friction to porn access with a nasty undercurrent of passive government surveillance running just below the surface.

Legislators may claim they have no access to identifying info gathered by porn sites, but claims like these are only as trustworthy as the people making them. Most people distrust lawmakers. Hence, most people will believe governments will know they’re accessing porn content, whether or not that’s actually the case.

Despite there being plenty of legislators deeply invested in passing performative laws, not every one of these legislative pitches will survive the less-than-close scrutiny of other representatives and other components of the legislative machinery. Belanger reports the South Dakota effort is currently stalled. And the law’s lead backer has offered up an absolutely hilarious explanation of her failure to shove this past a deeply conservative state legislature.

Republican Jessica Castleberry, seemingly failed to persuade the committee of the urgency of passing the law, saying at the hearing that “this is not your daddy’s Playboy. Extreme, degrading, and violent pornography is only one click away from our children.” She told Ars that the bill was not passed because some state lawmakers were too “easily swayed by powerful lobbyists.”

“It’s a travesty that unfettered access to pornography by minors online will continue in South Dakota because of lobbyists protecting the interests of their clients, versus legislators who should be protecting our children,” Castleberry told Ars. “The time to pass this bill was in the mid-1990s.”

There has never been a less likely to exist lobbying group than Big Porn. Castleberry appears to believe her fellow legislators were talked out of passing the bill by shadowy, suited men bearing black bags full of barely used Hustler back issues and handfuls of suspiciously sticky currency.

Equally as stupid as this scenario is the loaded language used by supporters of these laws. Some of this loaded language actually makes its way into the bills’ wording, resulting in dry legislative boilerplate occasionally punctuated by terms like “health crisis” or a peculiar insistence on referring to any and all sexual content (whether artistic or educational or of public interest) as “harmful content.”

This childish thinking isn’t actually going to protect any children. Limiting minors’ access to porn is a good idea, but the government isn’t the entity that’s most likely to succeed without causing a shit ton of collateral damage.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, adult content, arkansas, florida, free speech, id verification, internet freedom, kansas, louisiana, mississippi, porn, south dakota, virginia, west virginia

US Treasury Department Moves To Protect Internet Access For Iranian Citizens

from the pitching-in-to-help-the-oppressed dept

Information wants to be free and it is never freer than when it traverses the internet. That’s why so many autocratic leaders strive to shut down this essential connection. It allows governments to control narrative and control citizens. Limiting their communication options means it will be the government’s view that prevails.

Iran’s government has been headed up by a single Supreme Leader since 1989, an office put into place by the rightfully reviled Ayatollah Khomeini. The head of the Islamic state controls pretty much the entire government, making the position of president pretty much irrelevant. The Supreme Leader is considered to be above reproach. Those that do reproach find themselves punished severely. To maintain this illusion of godlike powers, Iran’s government has routinely interfered with internet use by its citizens.

Efforts have ranged from the moderately annoying to efforts approaching super-villainy. In 2011, Iran announced its plan to build its own internet, solely for the purpose of curtailing criticism of the government and silencing dissent. More bizarrely, the figurehead of the Iranian government’s official religion issued a fatwa against “immoral” high-speed internet connections, under the theory that swift connection speeds somehow violated the country’s “moral standards.”

The efforts to isolate Iranian citizens from the rest of the world continue. As of 2019, the government was still pursuing plans to create an Iran-only internet, something that has been in the works since 2005. Logistical hurdles make this more theoretical than practical, but in lieu of cutting off Iran from the rest of the world, the government has ramped up its persecution of dissent and criticism. Using none other than one of former president Donald Trump’s favorite terms, the government banned “fake news,” granting more power to already very powerful internet regulators.

Decades of internet-based suppression are finally being addressed by the US government. Following the shutdown of the internet in parts of the country in response to protests provoked by the death of a woman in police custody, the US Treasury Department is expanding its protection of essential online services.

Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury issued Iran General License (GL) D-2 to increase support for internet freedom in Iran by bringing U.S. sanctions guidance in line with the changes in modern technology since the issuance of Iran GL D-1. On Wednesday, the Iranian government cut off access to the Internet for most of its 80 million citizens to prevent the world from watching its violent crackdown on peaceful protestors sparked by the brutal death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s Morality Police. While Iran’s government is cutting off its people’s access to the global internet, the United States is taking action to support the free flow of information and access to fact-based information to the Iranian people. The updated guidance will authorize technology companies to offer the Iranian people more options of secure, outside platforms and services.

What this new license does is give tech companies around the world permission to develop products and expand their Iranian customer base without fear of being subjected to sanctions meant to punish the Iranian government. It also authorizes the Treasury Department to expand this license — on a case-by-case basis — to cover anti-surveillance and anti-censorship software created by Iranian developers, exempting them from sanctions targeting surveillance/censorship tech developed by the Iranian government.

Hopefully, this will quickly provide more options for Iranian citizens, allowing them to skirt domestic censorship by a government that long ago stopped serving the interests of its citizens.

Filed Under: internet freedom, iran, iran general license, sanctions, treasury department

Canadian Government Wants To Regulate Social Media Like Broadcast

from the not-gonna-work dept

It’s Canada’s turn in the carousel of attempts at terrible internet regulation around the world. The ruling Liberal party, which professor and internet law researcher Michael Geist has called the most anti-internet government in Canadian history for its wide variety of planned new internet laws, has been working for months on a bill to amend the Broadcasting Act and greatly broaden its scope, giving the CRTC (Canada’s counterpart to the FCC) authority over all kinds of online video and audio.

Canada has a long history of requiring broadcasters to support and air Canadian content, setting percentages of airtime that must be dedicated to it. While this is controversial and of questionable efficacy, it is at least coherent with regards to television and radio broadcasting over public airwaves — but Bill C-10 would bring streaming services and many other websites under the same regulatory regime, which also includes even more concerning powers to regulate political speech. Supposedly, this is targeting services like Netflix and Spotify — which already raises some serious questions as to how such regulation would work — while the bill’s champion, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, has repeatedly insisted that it will not cover social media and user generated content. The clause excluding such content was already worryingly narrow, and now the government has removed it anyway. And yet Guilbeault continues to insist user generated content has nothing to worry about, even though there are multiple reasons this is clearly untrue — not least of which is a new “exception that proves the rule” amendment setting the contours of UGC regulation, to be considered soon:

The amendment is a clear acknowledgement that user generated content are programs subject to CRTC?s regulation making power. Liberal MPs may claim the bill doesn?t do this, but their colleagues are busy submitting amendments to address the reality.

But it is not just that the government knew that its changes would result in regulating user generated content. The forthcoming secret amendment only covers one of many regulations that the CRTC may impose. The specific regulation ? Section 10(1)(c) of the Broadcasting Act ? gives the CRTC the power to establish regulations ?respecting standards of programs and the allocation of broadcasting time for the purpose of giving effect to the broadcasting policy set out in subsection 3(1).? While the government plans to remove that regulation from the scope of user generated content regulations, consider all the other regulations it intends to keep and impose on millions of Canadians. Regulations that are not found in the amendment and therefore applicable to user generated content include regulations:

(a) respecting the proportion of time that shall be devoted to the broadcasting of Canadian programs;?
(b) prescribing what constitutes a Canadian program for the purposes of this Act;
(e) respecting the proportion of time that may be devoted to the broadcasting of programs, including advertisements or announcements, of a partisan political character and the assignment of that time on an equitable basis to political parties and candidates;?

Each of these speak to potential new regulation on the free speech of Canadians. Most notable may be political speech, which gives the CRTC the power to order equal time for partisan political speech. While this was designed for broadcast networks, the legislation would now cover all programs, including user generated content.

Correction: The way the bill is worded, online services are apparently not covered by the “political balance” regulatory powers.

It’s a stunning, virtually unprecedented attack on the free speech of Canadians. Among the bill’s biggest problems is the fact that many of these powers are extremely vague and administered at the discretion of the unpredictable CRTC — which is also part of what allows the politicians behind it to equivocate and deny when pressed on what exactly it will do. It has been called “one of the most radical expansions of state regulation in Canadian history” by those journalists who have noticed just how far-reaching it might be:

While the government claims it would not empower the CRTC to regulate smaller services such as Britbox, social media sites such as YouTube, or online news content, the bill contains no specific provisions that would prohibit it ? and includes provisions that seem to allow it. For example, while the bill exempts ?programs that are uploaded to an online undertaking? by its users and ?online undertakings whose broadcasting consists only of such programs,? it leaves the way open for the CRTC to regulate services that show both user-generated and curated content. Like YouTube.

Likewise, lots of streaming services offer news content alongside movies and other fare. And lots of text-based news organizations, such as The Globe and Mail, also stream audio and video. So a specific exemption for audiovisual news content would not be greatly reassuring, even if the bill contained one ? which it doesn?t.

Luckily, the bill is getting much more attention following the latest changes. Unluckily, it’s at risk of becoming mired in the broader partisan fights of Canada’s parliament — even though this is a case of something that everyone, from every party (not least the Liberals pushing it) should oppose. I don’t have to explain why applying such regulations, especially about political “balance”, to social media would be a disaster for free speech, especially now with the pandemic keeping people trapped at home and spawning multiple political crises across the country. It’s not at all clear how the CRTC would use these powers, but there’s little reason to believe they’d use them wisely (as if such a thing is even possible), and the uncertainty alone could cause user generated content platforms to clamp down on what Canadians can share.

Plus, it’s especially concerning the way the government has repeatedly misled the public about what the bill will do, often contradicting itself and leaving the text full of loopholes that means it might apply to all kinds of unexpected things like app stores. Canadians from every part of the political spectrum must recognize Bill C-10 as the astonishing attack on free expression that it is, and force the government to reject it — or else the internet in Canada is going to get a whole lot smaller and less open.

Filed Under: audio, c-10, canada, content moderation, crtc, internet, internet freedom, regulations, social media, steven guilbeault, streaming, video

We're Living Our Lives On The Internet, And We Can't Be Free If It Isn't.

from the the-open-internet-is-more-important-than-ever dept

Last year, as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ?offline? world suddenly became a lot more online. All around the world, people have struggled to adapt. Worst off are those who can?t take internet access for granted. The Federal Communications Commission will spend many resources on the domestic side of this challenge, further investing in internet connectivity reach, quality, and affordability. But the international side, known as ?internet freedom,? is a harder question.

Internet freedom may generate fewer headlines than a decade ago, when it was a signature issue of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But internet freedom is just as necessary now as it was then. For example, in China, crucial information about the spread of COVID-19 was often unavailable, and citizens resorted to using technical workarounds to upload and view videos about the pandemic on government-blocked YouTube. And in Iran, those who follow the Bahá?í faith are denied access to education, and depend on internet freedom technologies to give themselves the most basic opportunities. There are many more such examples in internet repressive countries around the world.

Fortunately, bipartisan support for internet freedom in Congress has kept funding levels robust over the past four years, and consistent leadership from within the Department of State and other funders has kept this work strong. But as with so many other areas of policy, the Trump administration not only did not add value, but actively made things worse by engaging in a harmful turf war. Partisan leadership at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) disrupted the funding and operations of its independent grantee Open Technology Fund (OTF) when OTF chose to pursue good policy over bad politics, an approach that – to give one example – led the organization to support early development of the now-popular Signal secure messaging service.

The first internet freedom action by the Biden administration should be to reverse course and install leadership at USAGM that can work constructively with OTF, the State Department, and other funders to support scalable open source technology and community internet freedom solutions. Congress did its part through the defense funding bill passed on New Year?s Day (in the first-ever override of a veto by Trump), allocating substantial resources and setting the tone for open source to be at the heart of internet freedom efforts. And President Biden has cleared the way by firing Michael Pack, head of USAGM, on inauguration day. Now it?s President Biden?s move again, to make a better appointment at USAGM than his predecessor did.

Internet freedom is a human rights issue, but it isn?t just a human rights issue. As 2020 demonstrated so clearly, the internet is connective tissue for massive parts of our economy and our society. Thus, China?s Great Firewall does far more than just repress free expression: it also implements an economic protectionist agenda, and is a powerful tool for fostering nationalist support at home. To counter these challenges, the Biden administration should adopt a positive agenda of supporting the global free flow of data and information, to prove in practice the superiority of digital globalization over repression and protectionism. That means growing the internet freedom agenda further, well above and beyond the State Department?s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor where it was incubated, to embrace the economic and political divisions at State as well as the Department of Commerce.

Perhaps more than any other federal agency, the State Department is in need of a hard reboot. Under Trump, the United States reverted to being a unilateral bully, bringing back the ?Team America: World Police? spirit of the George W. Bush administration, forcing out centuries of institutional knowledge and expertise. Unsurprisingly, that strategy has failed. China in particular possesses many advantages on the global stage, and will be in an even better position in many respects after 2020. The United States faces a drastically weakened foreign policy position, and cannot turn any tides alone. In the context of internet freedom, the American agenda should include expanding efforts with the Freedom Online Coalition and other diplomatic avenues where we can work arm-in-arm with other countries who, frankly, possess more goodwill on the global stage than the U.S. does right now.

Finally, leadership starts at home. For at least the past decade, the U.S. approach to digital government surveillance has been outright hostile, highlighted by frequent battles in an ill-conceived war on encryption. President Biden has an opportunity to show strong support for privacy and security by shaping the interagency and National Security Council to better balance law enforcement with civil rights and internet freedom champions. The newly created role of a White House coordinator for democracy and human rights is a good start. It?s past time the U.S. stops pursuing backdoors that would put everyday internet users at great risk.

Where the internet isn?t open, the people aren?t free. Although the challenges facing the Biden administration in putting the United States back together will be many and broad-ranging, restoring American leadership on internet freedom should be a top priority.

Adam Fisk is the founder and president of Brave New Software, a leading 501(c)(3) developer of internet freedom technologies including Lantern and a recipient of U.S. government internet freedom support. Chris Riley is a strategic advisor to Brave New Software and a former member of the internet freedom program team at the State Department.

Filed Under: internet freedom, open internet, otf

Russia Expands Site Blocking To VPNs

from the watch-out dept

Over the last few years, Russia has been one of the most aggressive countries in using claims of copyright infringement to push for full site blocking at the ISP level. Of course, that has resulted in tens of thousands of innocent sites getting blocked (collateral damage!), not to mention a corruption scandal and… no meaningful decrease in piracy. Apparently, the answer for the Russians: head deeper into the infrastructure to push site blocking even further.

Now, apparently, beyond just demanding ISPs engage in massive site blocking, various VPNs have been ordered to start blocking full sites as well.

During the past few days, telecoms watch Roscomnadzor says it sent compliance notifications to 10 major VPN services with servers inside Russia ? NordVPN, ExpressVPN, TorGuard, IPVanish, VPN Unlimited, VyprVPN, Kaspersky Secure Connection, HideMyAss!, Hola VPN, and OpenVPN.

The government agency is demanding that the affected services begin interfacing with the FGIS database, blocking the sites listed within. Several other local companies ? search giant Yandex, Sputnik, Mail.ru, and Rambler ? are already connected to the database and filtering as required.

You can understand how this came about: as site blocking gets more popular, more people sign up for VPNs that allow them to get around local censorship and access content as before. However, it appears the Russians are trying to stop that as well. While not quite as bad as when China started banning VPNs completely, this still represents quite a threat to securely surfing the internet.

I was actually in Moscow a few years ago, very briefly, to speak on a panel, and I came armed with three separate VPN services to (hopefully?) stay safe and be able to tunnel out of the Russian internet. That was well before the big crackdown, however, and it must be more and more difficult to use the internet safely there. We’ve also discussed Russia’s supposed plans to test disconnecting from the internet — and it might not need to do much if it continues to reach deeper and deeper into the internet ecosystem to make it harder and harder to use the internet safely and securely.

And, of course, as Professor Annemarie Bridy notes, none of this is really about copyright infringement. This is entirely about authoritarian control of the internet and censorship:

The censorship machines that we build for copyright enforcement are the same ones authoritarians use to control dissent. Once the infrastructure is in place… https://t.co/cpsmj6kbSS

— Annemarie Bridy (@AnnemarieBridy) March 28, 2019

Indeed, remember a few years back when the Russian government used questionable claims of copyright infringement to intimidate government critics? The US’s infatuation with copyright has handed a tool of out and out censorship to authoritarian leaders, who can censor freely while insisting they’re doing so to help American copyright corporate interests.

Filed Under: internet freedom, isp, russia, site blocking, vpn

Don't Believe Those Who Wish To Diminish Digital Rights By Falsely Implying It's All Big Tech Lobbying

from the people-know-how-digital-rights-work dept

As we have been covering in the last couple of weeks, a controversial EU Copyright Directive has been under discussion at the European Parliament, and in a surprising turn of events, it voted to reject fast-tracking the tabled proposal by the JURI Committee which contained controversial proposals, particularly in Art 11 and Art 13. The proposed Directive will now get a full discussion and debate in plenary in September.

I say surprising because for those of us who have been witnesses (and participants) to the Copyright Wars for the last 20 years, such a defeat of copyright maximalist proposals is practically unprecedented, perhaps with the exception of SOPA/PIPA. For years we’ve had a familiar pattern in the passing of copyright legislation: a proposal has been made to enhance protection and/or restrict liberties, a small group of ageing millionaire musicians would be paraded supporting the changes in the interest of creators. Only copyright nerds and a few NGOs and digital rights advocates would complain, their opinions would be ignored and the legislation would pass unopposed. Rinse and repeat.

But something has changed, and a wide coalition has managed to defeat powerful media lobbies for the first time in Europe, at least for now. How was this possible?

The main change is that the media landscape is very different thanks to the Internet. In the past, the creative industries were monolithic in their support for stronger protection, and they included creators, corporations, collecting societies, publishers, and distributors; in other words the gatekeepers and the owners were roughly on the same side. But the Internet brought a number of new players, the tech industry and their online platforms and tools became the new gatekeepers. Moreover, as people do not buy physical copies of their media and the entire industry has moved towards streaming, online distributors have become more powerful. This has created a perceived imbalance, where the formerly dominating industries need to negotiate with the new gatekeepers for access to users. This is why creators complain about a value gap between what they perceive they should be getting, and what they actually receive from the giants.

The main result of this change from a political standpoint is that now we have two lobbying sides in the debate, which makes all the difference when it comes to this type of legislation. In the past, policymakers could ignore experts and digital rights advocates because they never had the potential to reach them, letters and articles by academics were not taken into account, or given lip service during some obscure committee discussion just to be hidden away. Tech giants such as Google have provided lobbying access in Brussels, which has at least leveled the playing field when it comes to presenting evidence to legislators.

As a veteran of the Copyright Wars, I have to admit that it has been very entertaining reading the reaction from the copyright industry lobby groups and their individual representatives, some almost going apoplectic with rage at Google’s intervention. These tend to be the same people who spent decades lobbying legislators to get their way unopposed, representing large corporate interests unashamedly and passing laws that would benefit only a few, usually to the detriment of users. It seems like lobbying must be decried when you lose.

But to see this as a victory for Google and other tech giants completely ignores the large coalition that shares the view that the proposed Articles 11 and 13 are very badly thought-out, and could represent a real danger to existing rights. Some of us have been fighting this fight when Google did not even exist, or it was but a small competitor of AltaVista, Lycos, Excite and Yahoo!

At the same time that more restrictive copyright legislation came into place, we also saw the rise of free and open source software, open access, Creative Commons and open data. All of these are legal hacks that allow sharing, remixing and openness. These were created precisely to respond to restrictive copyright practices. I also remember how they were opposed as existential threats by the same copyright industries, and treated with disdain and animosity. But something wonderful happened, eventually open source software started winning (we used to buy operating systems), and Creative Commons became an important part of the Internet’s ecosystem by propping-up valuable common spaces such as Wikipedia.

Similarly, the Internet has allowed a great diversity of actors to emerge. Independent creators, small and medium enterprises, online publishers and startups love the Internet because it gives them access to a wider audience, and often they can bypass established gatekeepers. Lost in this idiotic “Google v musicians” rhetoric has been the threat that both Art 11 and 13 represent to small entities. Art 11 proposes a new publishing right that has been proven to affect smaller players in Germany and Spain; while Art 13 would impose potentially crippling economic restrictions to smaller companies as they would have to put in place automated filtering systems AND redress mechanisms against mistakes. In fact, it has been often remarked that Art 13 would benefit existing dominant forces, as they already have filtering in place (think ContentID).

Similarly, Internet advocates and luminaries see the proposals as a threat to the Internet, the people who know the Web best think that this is a bad idea. If you can stomach it, read this thread featuring a copyright lobbyist attacking Neil Gaiman, who has been one of the Internet celebrities that have voiced their concerns about the Directive.

Even copyright experts who almost never intervene in digital rights affairs the have been vocal in their opposition to the changes.

And finally we have political representatives from various parties and backgrounds who have been vocally opposed to the changes. While the leader of the political opposition has been the amazing Julia Reda, she has managed to bring together a variety of voices from other parties and countries. The vitriol launched at her has been unrelenting, but futile. It has been quite a sight to see her opponents both try to dismiss her as just another clueless young Pirate commanded by Google, while at the same time they try to portray her as a powerful enemy in charge of the mindless and uninformed online troll masses ready to do her bidding.

All of the above managed to do something wonderful, which was to convey the threat in easy-to-understand terms so that users could contact their representatives and make their voice heard. The level of popular opposition to the Directive has been a great sight to behold.

Tech giants did not create this alliance, they just gave various voices access to the table. To dismiss this as Google’s doing completely ignores the very real and rich tapestry of those defending digital rights, and it is quite clearly patronizing and insulting, and precisely the reason why they lost. It was very late until they finally realized that they were losing the debate with the public, and not even the last-minute deployment of musical dinosaurs could save the day.

But the fight continues, keep contacting your MEPs and keep applying pressure.

Reposted from the TechnoLlama blog.

Filed Under: article 11, article 13, copyright, copyright directive, digital rights, eu, eu copyright directive, internet freedom

End Of An Era: Saying Goodbye To John Perry Barlow

from the pioneer dept

I was in a meeting yesterday, when the person I was meeting with mentioned that John Perry Barlow had died. While he had been sick for a while, and there had been warnings that the end might be near, it’s still somewhat devastating to hear that he is gone. I had the pleasure of interacting with him both in person and online multiple times over the years, and each time was a joy. He was always, insightful, thoughtful and deeply empathetic.

I can’t remember for sure, but I believe the last time I saw him in person was a few years back at a conference (I don’t even recall what conference), where he was on a panel that had no moderator, and literally seconds before the panel was to begin, I was asked to moderate the panel with zero preparation. Of course, it was easy to get Barlow to talk, and to make it interesting, even without preparation. But that day the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir (for whom Barlow wrote many songs — after meeting as roommates at boarding school) was in the audience — and while the two were close, they disagreed on issues related to copyright, leading to a public debate between the two (even though Weir was not on the panel). It was fascinating to observe the discussion, in part because of the way in which Barlow approached it. Despite disagreeing strongly with Weir, the discussion was respectful, detailed and consistently insightful.

Lots of people are, quite understandably, pointing to Barlow’s famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (which was published 22 years ago today). Barlow later admitted that he dashed most of that off in a bar during the World Economic Forum, without much thought. And that’s why I’m going to separately suggest two other things by Barlow to read as well. The first was his Wired piece, The Economy of Ideas from 1994, the second year of Wired’s existence, and where Barlow’s wisdom was found in every issue. Despite being written almost a quarter of a century ago, The Economy of Ideas is still fresh and relevant today. It is more thoughtful and detailed than his later “Declaration” and, if anything, I would imagine that Barlow was annoyed that the piece is still so relevant today. He’d think we should be way beyond the points he was making in 1994, but we are not.

The other piece is more recent I’ve seen a few people pointing to is his Principles of Adult Behavior, which are a list of 25 rules to live by — rules that we should be reminded of constantly. Rules that many of us (and I’m putting myself first on this list) fail to live up to all too frequently. Update I stupidly assumed that was a more recent writing by Barlow, but as noted in the comments (thanks!) it’s actually from 1977 when Barlow turned 30.

Cindy Cohn, who is now the executive director of EFF, which Barlow co-founded, mentions in her writeup how unfair it is that Barlow (and, specifically his Declaration) are often held up as the kind of prototype for the “techno-utopian” vision of the world that has become so frequently mocked today. Yet, as Cohn points out, that’s not at all how Barlow truly viewed the world. He saw the possibilities of that utopia, while recognizing the potential realities of something far less good. The utopianism that Barlow presented to the world was not — as many assume — him claiming these things were a sort of manifest destiny, but rather by presenting such a utopia, we might all strive and push and fight to actually achieve it.

Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity’s problems without causing any more. As someone who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth. Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: “I knew it?s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls ‘turn-key totalitarianism.’?

Just yesterday, before I learned of Barlow’s passing, we officially launched a new website, EveryoneCreates.org, which discusses just how ridiculous the myth — pushed by the RIAA and MPAA and their friends — that there’s some sort of “war” between “content and tech.” According to that narrative, the internet has done much to harm content creators. Yet, everywhere we look, we see the opposite. How content creators have been enabled by these technologies to create, to share, to distribute and, yes, to make money from their creations. Barlow was one of the first, if not the first, content creators from the “old” world, to wholeheartedly see the promise of the internet, and spent his life dedicated to making the internet such a powerful place for all of us content creators.

Either way, this is an end of an era. We’re in an age now where the general narrative making the rounds is, once again, touching on the moral panic of how terrible everything in technology is. Barlow spent decades teaching us about the possibilities of a better world on the internet, and nudging us, sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully, in that direction. And, now, just at a point where that vision is most at risk, he’s left us to continue that fight on our own. The internet world has many challenges ahead of it — and we should all strive to be guided both by Barlow’s principles and his vision of constantly pushing to mold the technology world into that world we want it to be — not ignoring the negatives, but looking for ways to get beyond them and expand the opportunities for the good to come out. It will be harder without him being there to help guide us.

Filed Under: freedom, internet, internet freedom, john perry barlow, music
Companies: eff

Yes, You Can Believe In Internet Freedom Without Being A Shill

from the a-little-history-lesson dept

You may have noticed lately that there’s an increasing (and increasingly coordinated) effort to paint today’s biggest and most successful companies as some kind of systemic social threat that needs to be reined in. As veteran tech journalist John Battelle put it, tech companies frequently are assumed these days to be Public Enemy No. 1, and those of us who defend the digital world in which we now find ourselves are presumptively marked as shills for corporate tech interests.

But a deeper historical understanding of how we got to today’s internet shows that the leading NGOs and nonprofit advocacy organizations that defend today’s internet-freedom framework actually predate the very existence of their presumed corporate masters.

To get taste a of the current policy debate surrounding Google and other internet companies, consider the movie I Am Jane Doe, which documents the legal battle waged by anti-sex-trafficking groups and trafficking victims against the website Backpage.com. The film, which premiered this February with a congressional screening, also tracks a two-year investigation and report by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations into the site’s symbiotic relationship with traffickers.

The documentary is powerful and powerfully effective. It has managed to accomplish what few works of art can ? encourage Congress to fast-track legislative action. Last month, a powerful group of 27 bipartisan cosponsors introduced new legislation targeting Backpage.com titled the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA. While there were rumors the bill would be attached to the upcoming “must-pass” defense authorization bill, it now appears it will move through regular order, with a hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee scheduled for Sept. 19.

Some documentarians strive to be perceived as neutral chroniclers, but I Am Jane Doe producer Mary Mazzio has lobbied aggressively on behalf of the bill. The film’s official website and social media accounts have also jumped into the fight, publishing legislative guides and lobbying materials, as well as rallying a coalition to go after the bill’s opponents.

Here’s our problem with Mazzio’s blunderbuss approach: since the bill’s introduction, internet-freedom advocates (including a letter by R Street, the Copia Institute and others) as well as legal academics have raised alarm bells. In particular, the bill’s overly broad provisions would gut key protections for free expression and digital commerce by amending a foundational law undergirding today’s internet ? Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

If you love even parts of what the internet has to offer, you likely owe thanks in some way or other to Section 230. We don’t view any statute as immune from any criticism, but we do insist that any effort to chisel away at a law expressly crafted to protect and promote freedom of speech on the internet deserves a great deal of scrutiny. The problems posed by the proposed legislation are both expansive and complex, and internet freedom groups have the expertise to highlight these complexities.

Mazzio isn’t one for complexity, as her film makes it a point to smear internet-freedom groups rather than address their arguments on the merits. The producers do interview experts from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), but ultimately paint those experts as shills for big tech companies. They allege advocates of online free speech and expression callously oppose commonsense efforts to curb trafficking simply because they would hurt big tech’s bottom line.

This kind of rhetoric has continued throughout the advocacy campaign to pass SESTA.

But the film’s promoters would be well-served to pay closer attention to the facts. Defenders of Section 230 aren’t “supporting Backpage,” any more than advocates of Fifth Amendment rights support criminals or oppose police. They also should look closer at the history.

While it may be easy to paint Section 230 proponents as shills for big tech because some of them sometimes receive funding from tech companies, the reality is that organizations like CDT and EFF supported these policies before today’s Big Tech even existed. And other nonprofits, like the foundation that hosts the immensely valuable free resource Wikipedia, don’t depend on corporate funding?they’re primarily funded by individual donations?yet insist that Section 230 is what made it possible for them to exist.

While Google was founded in 1998 and Backpage.com launched in 2004, both CDT and EFF, who are mischaracterized in the film as ersatz public-interest advocates, were deeply engaged in the debate way back in 1995 over the Communications Decency Act. There’s perhaps no greater evidence of how relatively un-slick and un-corporate those organizations were than their self-representations in the ASCII art newsletters of this pre-Google period supporting the bill that would later become Section 230 of the CDA:

Both organizations opposed almost all the language in the CDA and both spearheaded legal efforts that led to the CDA mostly being struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1997. But both also supported the Cox/Wyden amendment that would later become Section 230 of the act, which also created legal protections for “good Samaritan” blocking of offensive material. The Cox/Wyden amendment was added to the Telecommunications Act in the Senate in 1995, and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on Feb. 8, 1996.

It’s not just that Google and Backpage weren’t around when Section 230 became law. Facebook wasn’t founded until 2004, YouTube wasn’t founded until 2005 and Twitter wasn’t founded until 2006. This isn’t just a coincidence. Our vibrant online ecosystem exists because of Section 230 and the liability protections it affords to online platforms. It is the law that made today’s internet possible.

The Internet Association, a tech trade association that has helped lead industry opposition to SESTA, is mostly made up of tech companies (like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Yelp, Snap and Pinterest) that found success after the CDA and that rely, in one form or another, on its intermediary liability protections for user generated content. And keep in mind that it’s not just tech giants that oppose SESTA’s language amending Section 230. It’s dozens of startups and medium-sized companies, too.

Indeed, as outlined in this letter from internet-freedom advocates, there are good reasons to think SESTA’s proposed changes are hastily conceived and ill-suited to address the problems they purport to solve. Sex trafficking is a horrible crime, but Section 230 already does not protect sites like Backpage if they deliberately facilitate criminal acts. The limited immunity afforded to online platforms by Section 230 does not apply to any federal criminal law, nor should it apply to state criminal law if platforms are acting in bad faith. Furthermore, a 2015 amendment to sections of the federal code governing sex trafficking should make it even easier for federal prosecutors to go after sites that host ads for trafficking, although we still need time for the courts to interpret how it is applied.

The DOJ already has the power under current law?even without SESTA?to prosecute Backpage and its founders. Indeed, lawyers for Backpage acknowledged that "indictments may issue anytime" from a federal grand jury in Arizona. If they don’t, it’s the proper role of Congress to hold a hearing and ask Attorney General Jeff Sessions why they aren’t prosecuting this case or those like it.

If we need additional resources for the FBI or the DOJ’s criminal and civil rights divisions to investigate and prosecute these cases, that’s a conversation worth having. It also bears examining whether Congress should clarify the standards for platforms that contribute to the development of user content, given the different interpretations among the circuits.

But what we’re seeing in the “I Am Jane Doe” advocacy campaign is that SESTA’s proponents don’t want to have substantive conversations about the law. Instead, they want to create their own “fake news” version of what the issues are and rush their bill to passage, no matter the consequences.

Both the intended and unintended consequences of SESTA could be catastrophic. In effect, the law threatens to undermine all of Section 230’s benefits to the global internet ecosystem in order to make it easier to prosecute Backpage and its founders, who seem likely to end up in jail no matter what. While today’s tech giants will likely have the resources to navigate this in some form, the barriers it sets up could mean the next wave of internet platforms never come?and the ones that we have left are further incentivized to restrict speech. Rather than open a dialogue about current cases and the state of the law and how to refine Section 230’s protections, SESTA proponents want to rush in with a legislative chainsaw to carve out vast new liabilities for online platforms?the same platforms that provide us with the internet we love and upon which we all now rely.

If Congress rushes to pass SESTA without listening to the substantive arguments of the bill’s critics, it will be making a catastrophic mistake.

Mike Godwin is a senior fellow with the R Street Institute who worked extensively on the CDA at EFF in the mid-1990s. Godwin later worked for the Center for Democracy and Technology as well. Zach Graves is technology policy director at the R Street Institute.

Filed Under: cda 230, free speech, internet, internet freedom, section 230, sesta
Companies: cdt, eff, google

Dear Lawmakers: Five Years Ago The Internet Rose Up In Protest & We're Still Watching

from the we're-still-here dept

As you may have heard, today is the five-year anniversary of the massive internet blackout that tons of internet users and sites participated in to protest a pair of awful copyright laws, SOPA & PIPA, which would have undermined some of the most basic principles of a free and open internet. In case you’ve somehow forgotten, go and take a look at the Archive Team’s world tour of sites that either went down completely or put up some sort of detailed splash page speaking out against the bills and in favor of internet rights and freedoms. Contrary to what some have tried to claim in rewriting history, that event was a true example of a grassroots uprising against legacy industries and government bureaucracies that wanted to shackle the internet and make it less open, less free and less powerful.

Since that day, there have been multiple other fights around internet freedom, having to do with mass surveillance, encryption, privacy, net neutrality and more. And there will continue to be more fights — some of them repeats of fights we’ve already had, and some brand new ones. In particular, we see that Congress is already dipping its toes in the water about copyright reform, five years after SOPA. For years, we heard that, after SOPA, no one in Congress wanted to touch copyright law for fear of “being SOPA’d.” However, with some of the new plans coming out for copyright reform, it appears that some in Congress are hoping that the internet has forgotten or moved on.

The internet has not forgotten. The internet is watching closely.

This applies not just to copyright reform, but the latest plans to do away with net neutrality. As outgoing FCC boss Tom Wheeler has warned, the new FCC undermines net neutrality at its own peril. The public overwhelmingly supports net neutrality, and attempts to undermine it will lead the internet to speak up again. Of course, if those in power have their way, part of the undermining of an open internet will be to make it even harder for the public to speak out — which is why we need to do so loudly while we can.

There are, of course, also ongoing fights about backdooring encryption and mass surveillance on the internet. We still need to reform ECPA and other outdated surveillance laws. Executive Order 12333 is still a massive blackhole of surveillance powers. Later this year, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act is going to sunset and there will be a fight over its renewal.

We can’t — and won’t — create a massive “internet blackout” for every single threat to internet freedom. Unfortunately, if we were doing that, it would happen far too often. But policymakers are being naive if they think that they can effectively DDoS the internet policy space by promoting so many bad policies at once that the internet won’t notice. We may not win every battle, but the internet is watching carefully what policy makers do around making sure the internet remains open and free — and is ready to speak out when those core principles are attacked by legacy industries unwilling to innovate or by policymakers too captured by industries who seek to block innovation.

The internet is watching. The internet has not forgotten. And policymakers that seek to undermine an open internet may discover just how quickly and loudly the open internet responds to such threats.

Filed Under: advocacy, congress, copyright, encryption, internet freedom, net neutrality, open internet, pipa, politics, protests, sopa

Why Is Your Bigoted, Luddite Uncle Crafting Internet Policy In Europe?

from the seems-like-a-problem dept

A few weeks ago, we were greatly troubled to see the ridiculous copyright policy come out of the EU Commission. The whole thing seemed like a really bad joke. It was a law basically designed to destroy entrepreneurship and startups on the internet, and to basically forcibly take money from large internet companies and give them to failing legacy media companies that had refused to innovate. It seemed to go against what basically everyone (other than those legacy companies) had been telling the European Commission. And it seemed to directly violate what the European Commission itself had said about its plans. The inclusion of things like forcing any company to install filters, the plans to require specific business models at the regulatory level, and the idea that sites should have to pay those they link to are all ridiculous.

What almost everyone involved in the process made clear, was that this whole thing was driven by one guy: Gunther Oettinger a former tax lawyer who was appointed the European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society a few years ago, despite the fact that he’s not a fan of the internet at all. If you pay any attention at all to EU politics, you may have heard the name Gunther Oettinger quite a bit lately. That’s because he got caught making a series of remarks that were bigoted, racist, sexist and homophobic (he hit basically everything). He made fun of the Chinese, using racist terminology. He made fun of women in the government. He mocked gay marriage. He was on quite a roll.

Oh, and then he absolutely refused to apologize for a while:

Gunther Oettinger: Everything has been said. There is nothing to apologise for.

Euroactiv’s James Crisp: But there is a big scandal.

Oettinger: There is no scandal.

Of course, as more and more publications around the globe started talking about it he finally was forced to release a statement with a carefully worded apology:

I had time to reflect on my speech, and I can now see that the words I used have created bad feelings and may even have hurt people. This was not my intention and I would like to apologise for any remark that was not as respectful as it should have been.

Of course, at this time, Politico has also released a big profile on what they refer to as Oettinger’s “strange career.” The article notes that this little bigoted outburst is not a surprise and considered no big deal to his supporters — a columnist from his hometown describes it as “That?s just how our Oetti is,” in the same way you brush off your annoying bigot of an uncle at family gatherings with his horrible opinions. Except this bigoted uncle is setting serious policy issues across Europe — and ones that can have a major, major impact on the internet and freedom of expression, despite an almost ridiculous ignorance of technology — something he almost seems to take glee in not caring about.

From the article:

Back in 2014, Brussels didn?t have high hopes for him when he shifted from energy to take over the digital economy portfolio. He could be curt, tearing up his notes if he deemed a subject unworthy of his attention. In the often pretentious world of Brussels officialdom, he came across as unintellectual and unserious ? more likely to obsess over cars or football than trade deals or European Union directives.

To make matters worse, as a die-hard Luddite, he seemed uniquely unqualified for his new position. His more tech-savvy boss, Commission Vice President for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip, was at ease on social media or on the trendiest apps, like Pokemon Go.

Oettinger, as he told the crowd at his now-infamous Hamburg speech last week, preferred an old-fashioned newspaper to Twitter and document printouts to a tablet or iPhone. As he settled into his office, his aides rushed to install a computer and carry away piles of paper stacked precariously on every available surface.

In the 22 months since his appointment, Oettinger has changed little. He continues to express more interest in breakthroughs in the automotive industry than the more abstract areas of his portfolio, such as data flows or ICT standards. His home in Brussels, he told a group of reporters and tech lobbyists recently, is not set up for Wi-Fi ? something he attributes to his long hours at the office. At home, he prefers ?a nice bottle of Bordeaux? to a broadband connection, he added.

And yet… he’s the guy in charge of crafting digital/internet and copyright policy in the EU. How does this make any sense at all? Now, there’s something to be said for sometimes having an outsider’s view on things, and no one’s arguing that he needs to come from the internet industry or anything like that. But Oettinger not only seems to not understand and not care about the internet, but he also seems to have no problem playing political favoritism with old legacy industries where he has friends — especially industries who have been impacted by innovation and failed to embrace the internet.

While Ansip has struggled to push forward his ambitious agenda centered around breaking down digital barriers, often referred to as geo-blocking, Oettinger has used his negotiating skills to deliver for his allies in industry, like the German publishing sector, a series of high-profile victories.

During the summer, he strong-armed his way into negotiations on boosting European startups, infuriating his more innovation-focused colleagues. Before that, he bulldozed past Vodafone to accept a plan that would keep some power over German copper network cables in the hands of giant Deutsche Telekom.

So we’re left with your nutty, bigoted, luddite uncle… and put him effectively in charge of making policy choices that will impact the entire internet, and no one seems to care that he’s more focused on delivering favors to his friends in the old, legacy industries that failed to adapt.

Doesn’t that seem like a problem?

Filed Under: copyright, copyright policy, eu, eu commission, gunther oettinger, internet, internet freedom, luddite