The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [128]
Nevertheless, as discussions on the subject advance, it’s already possible to outline various schools of thought. One must distinguish between the weak form of Internet freedom promoted by the Obama administration and foreign policy liberals and its strong form, which is embraced by those who favor a more assertive, neoconservative foreign policy (its adherents are scattered across numerous think tanks like the George W. Bush Institute, the Hudson Institute, Freedom House, many of which were present at the Bush Institute gathering in Texas).
Whereas the weak form implies an almost exclusive focus on defending online freedom of expression—freedom of the Internet—the strong version, eagerly embraced by the cyber-cons, seeks to promote freedom via the Internet and envisions the Internet as an enabler of some kind of 1989-inspired bottom-up revolt, with tweets replacing faxes. To use Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction, while the weak form of Internet freedom is preoccupied mostly with promoting negative liberty (i.e., freedom from something: government online surveillance, censorship, DDoS attacks), the strong form of Internet freedom is more concerned with advancing the causes of positive liberty (i.e., freedom to do something: mobilize, organize, protest).
The strong agenda operates with the plain old rhetoric of “regime change” but spruced up with the libertarian language of Palo Alto. The weak agenda, it seems, aspires for little else but the preservation of the Internet as it is today, and it is ultimately rooted in the defense of freedom of expression, as codified in Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”). The vision that underpins the struggle to build a world with few limits on speech does not necessarily forgo democracy promotion as one of its objectives; rather it takes a much longer view. The cyber-cons, of course, wouldn’t mind preserving a free Internet either, but for them it’s mostly an instrument to enable democratic rebellions in Belarus, Burma, and Iran.
Those in the weak agenda camp—most of them self-proclaimed fans of liberalism and international institutions—are walking into a trap of their own making, for most nonexperts, at least judging by the irrational exuberance over Iran’s Twitter Revolution, interpret the term in its strong form, characterized by a much more aggressive use of the Internet to overthrow authoritarian regimes. The first image that comes to mind when one hears the words “Internet freedom” is that of the dying Neda Agha-Soltan surrounded by Iranian youngsters with mobile phones, not the picturesque conference room of the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva hosting a debate about the future of Internet governance. The problem is that if this more aggressive interpretation sticks around—and so far all the indicators show that it will—liberals’ ability to protect the free flow of information on the Internet as well as to actually promote freedom without the Internet (i.e., through more conventional offline means) could be severely compromised.
That there are two different kinds of Internet freedom is lost on most media commentators in America, who believe that it’s one of the few truly bipartisan issues facing the nation. Commenting on the George Bush cyber-dissidents conference in Dallas, Barrett Sheridan, a staff reporter for Newsweek, admired the fact that “there aren’t many ideas that unite former U.S. president George W. Bush and his successor, Barack Obama, but one