Archive for January, 2012

  • 25 Jan

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    The Internet blacks out

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    WITH no small amount of glee, I happily informed students who were late handing in their assignments that Wikipedia was going to be “blacked out” for a day.

    That was last Wednesday, the day where Internet giants like Wikipedia, Google, Facebook and Reddit decided to “black out” their sites in protest against the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) bring tabled in the US.

    Depending on the site, the “black out” meant different things. For Wikipedia, users browsing the English language website last Wednesday would find a message popping up instead, telling them to “imagine a world without free knowledge.”

    Indeed, if you were a student looking for help on Wikipedia that very instant, you couldn’t do anything but experience what living without Wikipedia would be like.

    Other sites, like Reddit, chose to “censor” every single line of content. You could see that content had been written and shared, but you couldn’t read what it was – no thanks to a thick black line running through the text.

    Google adopted a safer approach, choosing to show US users only a blacked out Google Logo on its front page. I can only imagine the pandemonium that would ensue if Google were to go down.

    So obviously, there was a big hoo-hah over the Internet about this piece of legislation called SOPA, and to a lesser extent, its cousin called the “Protect IP Act” (PIPA). And it grabbed the attention of the Internet audience. But, what exactly is this act about? And why should you and I care about it?

    Let me do my best to break it down to you. SOPA is piece of US legislation that seeks to allow companies that think their stuff is being pirated to file a lawsuit against websites outside of the United States and force action that would stop those websites from being accessed by people in the US.

    Confused? Here’s how it works: Say you’re a big Hollywood company and you’ve released your brand new blockbuster movie. But as you are sending the video files to the cinemas, you discover it’s already on some website called “ShareYourBigFiles.ru”.

    Now, you think, “Oh no, if people are downloading the movie, I can’t get them to buy movie tickets from the cinema.” So you try to file a lawsuit.

    Unfortunately, the website’s owners are based outside the US and the actual servers are also located in another country. This means you’ll need to go through the laws of their country – laws which may not take US copyright law quite as stringently – to bring them to court.

    What can a company in these dire straits do? The supposed answer is SOPA, which would allow the company to file a lawsuit in US courts, and block the offending website from being accessed inside the US. They are not shutting down the website, but removing it from the screens of US citizens.

    “Wait a minute,” you think, “that sounds reasonable.” Well, if you’ve been listening to the big media company’s side of the story, you might feel that way too. But here’s why technology companies such as Google and Facebook and Wikipedia have been rallying supporters to object to SOPA.

    Buried deep in SOPA’s legislation, is this phrase: “A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order…Such actions shall be taken as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within five days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order.”

    What this means is that through SOPA, a media company can essentially tell an Internet Service Provider to censor a website by going to court and obtaining a court order. And by pursuing a case as stringently as possible, it can essentially erase a website from the face of the American Internet. Now, if the US sets this precedent, which nations do you think will soon follow suit?

    The part that’s dangerous about this is that it starts to make the Internet Service Provider responsible for policing content. In Malaysia, we’re fortunate to have the Bill of Guarantee under the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) to ensure the Internet shall remain uncensored. It’s a benefit we should really be thankful for.

    Imagine if TMNet now is responsible for blocking sites like YouTube simply because someone posted “pirated” content? Or if DropBox needed to cease its service because some pirated files were found on someone’s account? The thought is ludicrous, but it’s something that Sopa’s shown us we’re taking for granted.

    The Internet as we experience it today is free and fluid. You can go online and start a blog and post your own opinions. You can use Facebook to easily connect with friends, and share media. Even the much-maligned Bit-Torrent technology is used to deliver useful information faster (it’s not all about piracy). On the Malaysian front, Information, Communications and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Rais Yatim has said last year that the country is committed to keeping the Internet free.

    The proponents for a free Internet are against SOPA not because it’s not reasonable to want to protect your ideas and original work, but because of its deeper ramifications, chiefly taking us down that slippery slope of Internet censorship. Some 4.5 million people signed a pledge last Wednesday to oppose Sopa and any form of legislation that could lead to Internet censorship. Wikipedia’s message calls SOPA a “legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet.”

    For the rest of us, we really need to ask ourselves: “So, how much would you like your Internet to remain free and open?”

    Appreciate the freedom you have today. Oh, and appreciate Wikipedia too. Let’s hope the Internet never black out again.

    * David Lian has tried using the Internet in China where censorship is heavy (you can’t even get to Facebook) and it’s really not fun. Tweet him at @davidlian.

  • 10 Jan

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    What is right

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    JUST last week, Vinton Cerf got the interwebs abuzz with his article in the New York Times titled “The Internet is not a human right”.

    Besides the sensational headline, the article was also fascinating because Cerf is one of the original architects of the Internet, back when it was used by only the military.

    I’m not sure of his intentions for writing the article, but one could argue that a couple of things that happened in 2011 led to it.

    Dr Vinton Cerf: "The Internet is not a human right."

    The first is of course the massive protests that happened around the world – from the “revolutions” in the Middle East and North Africa to the Occupy movement.

    Journalists, academics and the layman have spent the past 12 months debating the role the Internet, and social media specifically, played in the movement.

    The digital determinist among us are more than happy to give social media all the credit. After all, there is no doubt that we are on the edge of a communication revolution and even after these few years, it still remains a buzzword.

    Then there are the opponents to this idea, like writer Malcolm Gladwell who wrote, “The revolution will not be tweeted”. Those who share his sentiment claim that social media did not cause the revolutions, but instead only served as an enabler.

    The arguments had escalated to the point where, as Cerf noted in his article, there are suggestion that the Internet should be a human right.

    “The issue is particularly acute in countries whose governments clamped down on Internet access in an attempt to quell the protesters,” he wrote.

    It was at this juncture, however, that Cerf  made his point – “technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself”.

    In my opinion, he is absolutely right (no pun intended). My view is that technology affords communication and the dissemination of information, which in turn affords access to information, freedom of speech and education.

    These three things, among others, are what I would consider human rights. If technology was to be a right in itself, then one could easily argue – within the same context – that radio frequency, telecommunication waves and satellite signals are human rights too.

    The second thing is the introduction of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States.

    According to popular technology site CNet, if passed, the act will allow “the US attorney general to seek a court order against the targeted offshore website that would, in turn, be served on Internet providers in an effort to make the target virtually disappear”.

    In short, ISPs can be pressured to block off access to certain websites – ie censorship.

    Naturally, the major supporters of the act are the entertainment industry, who claim to be victims of acts of online “piracy”. The bill is expected to come to a vote when the US Congress meets next.

    However, CEOs representing major companies in the digital industries – like Google, Twitter, Mozilla, Yahoo! and Facebook – have come out to oppose it through an open letter.

    Google are one of the companies opposed to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act.

    Nowhere in the letter, however, do these CEOs claim that the Internet is a right.

    Instead, they write that the act will allow the US government “to censor the web using techniques similar to those used in China, Malaysia and Iran” – which, I suppose, would infringe freedom to information via censorship.

    They also claim that the act will “deny website owners the right to due process of law”, which infringes the right to a fair trial.

    In his article, Cerf wrote: “The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information – and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time.”

    Cerf also noted that a larger issue has been overlooked amid this debate, and that is the “responsibility of technology creators themselves to support human and civil rights”.

    He proposed that engineers take on a larger role in ensuring that technology continues to protect users and help them exercise their human rights.

    I would like to take this one step further and suggest that it is not just the CEOs, technologist and even people like Cerf, who should take on this role.

    We – the users – should as well.

    In 2012, I hope that users will empower themselves more, through knowledge and practice, to ensure that nothing (and definitely not their own actions) compromises what amazing technologies we have that makes the world a better place.

    * Niki is an MA Digital Culture and Society student at King’s College London. Read his jottings on digital culture at www.nikicheong.com or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/nikicheong.