Web Freedom Is Seen as a Growing Global Issue in 2015

San Francisco: Government censorship of the Internet is a cat-and-mouse game. And despite more aggressive tactics in recent months, the cats have been largely frustrated while the mice wriggle away.

But this year, the challenges for Silicon Valley will mount, with Russia and Turkey in particular trying to tighten controls on foreign-based Internet companies. Major U.S. companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google are increasingly being put in the tricky position of figuring out which laws and orders to comply with around the world - and which to ignore or contest.

On Wednesday, Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, signed the latest version of a personal data law that will require companies to store data about Russian users on computers inside the country, where it will be easier for the government to get access to it. With few companies expected to comply with the law, which goes into effect Sept. 1, a confrontation may well erupt.

The clumsiness of current censorship efforts was apparent in mid-December, when Russia's Internet regulator demanded that Facebook remove a page that was promoting an anti-government rally. After Facebook blocked the page for its 10 million or so Russian users, dozens of copycat pages popped up and the word spread on other social networks like Twitter. That created even more publicity for the planned Jan. 15 event, intended to protest the sentencing of Aleksei A. Navalny, a leading opposition figure.

Anton Nosik, a prominent Russian blogger whose work has been censored by regulators, said it was absurd for a government to think it could easily stamp out an article or video when it can be copied or found elsewhere with a few clicks. "The reader wants to see what he was prevented from seeing," Nosik said in an interview. "All that blocking doesn't work."

Instead, that prompted the government to switch tactics, moving Navalny's sentencing to Dec. 30 with little notice in an attempt to diminish protests.

The Turkish government faced similar embarrassment when it tried to stop the dissemination of leaked documents and audio recordings on Twitter in March. The administration of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was then prime minister and is now president, ordered the shutdown of Twitter within Turkey after the company refused to block the posts, which implicated government officials in a corruption investigation.

Not only did the government lose a court fight on the issue, but while Twitter was blocked, legions of Turkish users also taught one another technical tricks to evade the ban, even spray-painting the instructions on the walls of buildings.

"We all became hackers," Asli Tunc, a professor of communication at Istanbul Bilgi University, said in a phone interview. "And we all got on Twitter."

Despite such victories for free-speech advocates, governments around the world are stepping up their efforts to control the Internet, escalating the confrontation.

Originally posted here:
Web Freedom Is Seen as a Growing Global Issue in 2015