The long-celebrated civil liberty known as ‘freedom of speech’ was a key area of debate throughout much of 2012 - especially the latter half of the year. The Leveson report caused many to reconsider what it means to have a free press, the Muslim community spoke out against anti-Islamic videos, and the Occupy protest camp in London highlighted issues around the way church, state, big business and citizens relate to one another. The London riots highlighted the way technology and specifically the internet can be used as a tool for malicious intent, with reports suggesting rioters coordinated their movements through social networking sites. A year later, in the same neighbourhoods, the same networks were buzzing with Olympic-sized positivity, with images of the incredible opening ceremony, the Mobot and Wiggo on his throne being just a few of the moments of national triumph shared and downloaded in their millions.
We take the freedom of the internet for granted and despite well-publicised restrictions on file-sharing networks and the information security measures in place since Wiki-leaks, many internet users still believe it is completely free from governance. This is not the case. A long list of influential organisations such as the Internet Architecture Board (which “provides oversight of the process used to create Internet Standards”) are ultimately answerable to the United States government, despite a ‘hands-off’ approach.
Other large nation states, particularly China and Russia, have widespread censorship controls in place, with strict limits on what their citizens have access to – social networking in particular. These states have made several plays to take more control of the internet since its birth, but many commentators see a recent United Nations summit as the point when the power struggle intensified. It looks very likely that we will see more measures designed to govern the internet in future, but the real challenge to internet freedom is the desire to control it.
The vibrancy of the internet is possible because it is very much like a living organism, which is something that Google, one of its main gatekeepers are keen to uphold through their search ranking algorithms: promote sites with personal relevance and penalise ones heavy with impersonal spam, to make content king.
As Prof Alan Woodward, visiting professor at the University of Surrey’s department of computing, states: “What we really need to avoid is establishing something that will stifle the innovation that has made the internet such an exciting environment.”
Freedom has never meant that we can do whatever we want - laws, social constraints and client expectations rightly place boundaries on our creative expression, but in future it may well be individual governments that seek to dictate not just what we see on this sprawling virtual ecosystem, but also what we add to it.