Internet censorship: Let it rot in walled gardens

October 11, 2012, 5:30 AM PDT

Takeaway: Attempts to shut us up in walled gardens and curb our online freedoms are impossible to implement and police. The nature of the internet sees to it that they are doomed to fail.

The quandary for governments is that because the web is ubiquitous and transparent it is hard to police and harder to censor. Photo: Shutterstock

John Gilmore, an internet activist who was also one of the co-founders of both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the first free software company, Cygnus Solutions, once wrote that the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

The internet was designed to enable military communications to find their way around points of failure in the event of a nuclear war. If one node fails or drops certain messages because it doesnt like their subject the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route, according to Gilmore.

Censorship is practised for all kinds of political, social and commercial reasons, and all societies have limits on acceptable behaviour, but the point of the web is that there are no walled gardens and no limits to what we can access. If information wants to get out there, it will.

The idea that the internet is a universal resource that should be accessible to all is enshrined in the Declaration of Principles of the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) of December 2003, which says, Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; that 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.

Such declarations were relatively meaningless before the emergence of the world wide web, which has transformed the possibilities for information exchange and the dissemination of ideas, and how we respond to them.

Beyond the possibilities of static media, the internet can be seen as a democratising force. It has allowed us to interact with our peers across the cultural, racial, political and religious boundaries of the physical world, precisely because there are few barriers to what we say and how we say it, other than the approval or approbation of our peers.

What makes the internet different is that, unlike newspapers or television, it is interactive. We can determine what we read and how we read it. We are the editors and the filters. We can speak and share our vision with our fellow citizens on the opposite side of the globe without the interference of spokesmen or intermediaries.

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Internet censorship: Let it rot in walled gardens