The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [125]
As long as Western governments regulate the Internet out of concerns for terrorism or crime, as they currently aspire to, they also legitimize similar efforts—but this time done primarily for political reasons—undertaken by authoritarian governments. Even worse, in areas like cybercrime, the military and intelligence communities on both sides of the Atlantic would actually be quite happy to see Russian and Chinese governments establish stronger control over their respective national Internets. The West’s own desire to have those governments do something about uncontrollable, even if hardly devastating, cyber-attacks that are regularly unleashed by their hacker populations trumps the impetus to promote abstract goods like Internet freedom simply because the security of America’s own trade secrets always comes before the security of foreigners’ social networking profiles.
To top it all off, officials tasked with U.S. domestic Internet policy—above all, the Federal Communications Commission—are also fond of the term “Internet freedom,” by which they refer, primarily, to the issue of network neutrality, that is, ensuring that all types of content are treated equally and are not discriminated against by ISPs. The landmark net neutrality legislation proposed by FCC bears the name “Internet Freedom Act of 2010.” It may be the case that drawing some parallels between the foreign and the domestic uses of the term may help both diplomats and technology policy wonks bring greater media attention to their cause, but, most likely, it would make both meanings extremely fuzzy, creating rhetorical traps for the U.S. government. In late 2009, while speaking on the subject of network neutrality, Andrew McLaughlin, the deputy chief technology officer of the U.S. government, said that “if it bothers you that the Chinese government [censors the Web], it should bother you when your cable company does it.” He thus unwillingly supplied authoritarian governments with one more potential opportunity to chide the United States for not sticking to the principles it wants to promote abroad. Should the FCC’s own aspirations to promote net neutrality be undercut by Congress, the Chinese and Iranian governments would score some major propaganda points by simply pointing out that American lawmakers, too, are regularly impinging on Internet freedom. Such is the cost of building government policy around highly ambiguous terms and then choosing to use them in completely different contexts.
Cyberwar Can Be Good for You
But foreign policy challenges and contradictions would also make the defense of Internet freedom hard to mount in the long term. As it becomes easier to organize targeted and well-contained attacks (i.e., without any unintended side effects) on sites of, say, Islamic extremists, there will be more calls to simply disable them, if only to stop future terrorist attacks. Of course, such sites also present immense intelligence value, which may explain why so many of them are allowed to operate. But this choice between attacking and spying on sites that the West hates or fears does not sound like a good way to burnish its credentials as a defender of Internet freedom.
Before the West makes an unconditional commitment to keeping the Internet free at all costs and in all situations, it also needs to consider that such policy is likely to clash with its own need to control and disrupt flows of information under pressing circumstances. Back in the 1990s it was quite fashionable to talk of “information intervention.” Jamie Metzl, then a U.S. State Department official who emerged as a leading advocate