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By Root 1859 0

it easier to track online pedophile activities and protect their children. Hollywood, music studios, and publishing companies are pushing for better ways to track and delete unauthorized exchange of copyright-protected content. Banks want stricter identity controls to minimize online fraud. That more and more people in the developing world are getting online is not seen as a precursor to a truly global conversation but rather as a precursor to global hell populated by Nigerian email scammers. Back in 1997, Eli Noam, a professor of communications at Columbia University, rightly observed that a free Internet—an Internet without barriers of any sort, where governments cannot erect barriers to protect their citizens against practices and services that they deem illegal—is not what the American public wants, so Americans should stop being in denial. “For all the rhetoric of an Internet ‘free trade zone,’ will the United States readily accept an Internet that includes Thai child pornography, Albanian tele-doctors, Cayman Island tax dodges, Monaco gambling, Nigerian blue sky stock schemes, Cuban mail-order catalogues?” asked Noam on the pages of the New York Times. The answer was no in 1997, and it’s a much more resounding no today.

And the conversation gets even weirder once we get out of the United States and look at other Western democracies. When South Korean lawmakers want their government to be more effective in banning any South Koreans from visiting any North Korean websites, it’s hard to imagine how a common Western position on Internet freedom may ever emerge. Such cacophony is not lost on authoritarian governments, who take every opportunity to introduce their own Internet controls and justify them based on greater regulation of the Web by their peers in the West. In February 2006, when confronted with criticism that there is too much Internet control in China, Liu Zhengrong, who then supervised Internet affairs for the information office of China’s State Council, quoted the American experience with the USA PATRIOT Act and asked why China cannot be allowed to do the same. “It is clear that any country’s legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal information. We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job on this front.... So why should China not be entitled to do so?” So far Western democracies have not come up with a satisfying answer.

Western policymakers’ nearly exclusive attention to problems like cybercrime and censorship may have crowded out serious debate on arguably more important issues like privacy. Lawmakers in most countries—with the possible exceptions of Germany, Switzerland, and Canada—have found themselves too overwhelmed to regulate social networks, essentially giving carte blanche to sites like Facebook. Furthermore, most cheerleaders of Web 2.0 believe that the calls for more privacy are unjustified and we as a society need to adjust to a world where everything is transparent. “We will simply become much more accepting of indiscretions over time. The point is, we don’t really care about privacy anymore. And Facebook is just giving us exactly what we want,” writes Michael Arrington of the popular technology blog TechCrunch. “I’d rather have entrepreneurs making high-profile mistakes about [privacy] boundaries, and then correcting them, than silently avoiding controversy ... or avoiding a potentially contentious area of innovation because they are afraid of backlash,” says Tim O’Reilly, the iconic publisher of technology books.

Such a stance is seriously problematic, for it has dire implications for users in authoritarian states. While many of us in the developed world can maybe survive the demise of privacy as long as other legal institutions are working well (and that’s a very big “maybe”), it might easily have disastrous consequences elsewhere. Developing countries, where most citizens do not have bankable credit cards and are thus of little interest to online advertisers, hardly matter for Silicon Valley. No one is going to design a more secure version of their social network for