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By Root 1780 0

of this world into responsible global citizens. Unfortunately, there was little acknowledgment of that fact in Hillary Clinton’s seminal speech on the subject, even thought this is an area where Western policymakers could accomplish the most simply by means of legislation. Nascent industry-wide initiatives like the Global Network Initiative—which Facebook didn’t join, claiming that, as a young company, it did not have the resources to pay the $250,000 membership fee—that aspire to make technology companies pledge their commitment to a set of values are, in principle, a worthy undertaking. But ensuring compliance to the very principles that companies pledge allegiance to may require a strong push from governments in North America and Europe. Microsoft, for example, is a member of GNI, and yet the way its Bing search engine works in the Middle East does not fully adhere to the spirit of the initiative. Unless technology companies are somehow made to deliver on their own pledges, initiatives like GNI will be little but publicity stunts, meant to assure policymakers that the companies joining it are responsible global citizens.

Most unfortunately, it seems that the relatively short-lived quest for Internet freedom has already been corrupted by that old Washington problem: the tight embrace between policymakers and the industry. Two of the high-profile State Department appointees who spearheaded much of the work on Internet freedom, including establishing a close partnership with Silicon Valley firms, left Washington to work for those very firms. One, Katie Jacobs Stanton, adviser to the Office of Innovation, left to work for Twitter as its head of international strategy; the other, Jared Cohen, went to Google to head its new think tank. Of course, such turnover is nothing new for Washington, but it hardly provides an effective foundation for promoting Internet freedom or taking a critical view of the practices of technology firms, which are also in desperate need of suave executives with government experience.

The Beam in Thine Own Cyberspace

Even though the emerging public debate about Internet freedom inevitably ends with loud calls to oppose greater control of the Internet by authoritarian governments, Western policymakers should not let such rhetoric get the better of their common sense. Otherwise it would become all too easy to ignore the problems and debates about Internet regulations in their own backyard. The reality is that in their statements and actions most policymakers already acknowledge that a free Internet unburdened by regulation is likely to be as conducive to democratization as a government unburdened by the rule of law.

As the Internet gains in importance and penetrates more and more walks of public life, Western governments are poised to feel—and many of them are already feeling—growing pressure to regulate it. Some of that pressure will inevitably have illegitimate, harmful, and undemocratic origins; much of it won’t. The way forward is to acknowledge that the public pressure to regulate the Web is growing and that not all of the ensuing regulation should be resisted because the Internet is the sacred cow of the libertarian movement. The only way to get it right is to avoid holding on to some abstract absolute truths—for example, that the Internet is a revolutionary force that should be spared any regulation whatsoever—but rather to invest one’s energy into seeking broad public agreement on what acceptable, transparent, just, and democratic procedures by which such regulation is to occur should look like.

While the discussion of those ideal procedural principles merits a book of its own, anyone designing them should be aware of some major inconsistencies between the strong antiregulation impetus of Western foreign policy and the equally strong pro-regulation impetus of Western domestic policy. For while American diplomats are preaching the virtues of a free and open Internet abroad, an Internet unburdened by police, court orders, and censorship, their counterparts in domestic law enforcement,