Joshua Williams
Assignment 5
Scholarly research essay
Internet Censorship: Where do we go from here?
In 1993, the internet accounted for only one percent of worldwide telecommunications. By 2000,
it accounted for fifty one percent and by 2007 the internet accounted for ninety seven percent of all
telecommunications lines worldwide. (Hilbert, Lopez, 2011) This illustrates the enormous role the
internet has come to play in each of our lives. The internet provides freedoms and services to each of us
on a day to day basis. It is nearly impossible to completely disconnect ourselves from this
communications giant made by the people for the people. With every good thing comes something bad,
however, and as much good as the internet has there is an equal if not greater evil. With every click of the
mouse we risk exposure to identity theft, hate sites, illicit and illegal activity, and sexually explicit
content. The prevailing debate today is how to deal with these evils (if to deal with them at all), and to
what degree governments should be allowed to interfere with and censor the internet. The question I will
attempt to answer is, are these attempts at censorship justified, and if so, how best to move forward with
censorship. To answer this I must first understand why there is no quick and easy solution, and the
complexities of this topic.
The internet itself does not answer to any one man, organization, or government. Rather, it is a
world-wide system that crosses cultures, nations, and borders. A single file can be stored on servers in
every nation on the globe, making it virtually impossible to find and delete that file. For this reason
internet censorship is as elusive and complex as the internet itself. In order to completely control the
content that their people see, a government would have to find and delete every file with that content
globally. International law prohibits this very act, essentially creating a “hands off” atmosphere to any
files or property being held in a foreign land. It can be likened to the United States situation with
Pakistan. We can root out and attack the terrorists in Afghanistan, but once they cross the border into
Pakistan, permission needs to be granted to do anything within Pakistan’s borders. The same goes for the
internet. A government is perfectly within their right to shut down a site hosted within their country, but
has little to no authority over a site hosted outside of its own borders.
The difference between terrorists and the internet is that terrorists are seen as a threat by almost
every country on the globe, whereas the content of the internet is actually protected under freedom of
speech by most countries. For example, the French case of Yahoo inc. v. La Ligue Contre Le Racisme et
L'antisemitisme illustrates this situation perfectly. In France and Germany, pro-Nazi sites and
memorabilia such as swastikas are prohibited under national law. When Yahoo Inc. began displaying
Nazi memorabilia on their French portal, Yahoo.fr, Yahoo was taken to French Court and explicitly told
to stop displaying these anti-Semitic items. Instead of appealing to a French court, Yahoo instead
appealed to the Federal Court system of the United States. Yahoo argued that because they do not know
where requests for goods and services are coming from all the time, the request made by France would
require them to completely remove these services from their site, violating their freedom of speech in the
U.S. The Federal Court system ruled that because Yahoo is based in the U.S., France had no jurisdiction
over what Yahoo chose to display on their site. Since this case, it has been nearly impossible for any
government or company to affect the content of foreign sites. (Bauml, 2012)
The next logical position a government would take on internet censorship is to not take down the
source of the banned or unwanted material, but to block it from ever reaching its citizens or represented
people. The prevailing idea is to filter or block unwanted material at the Internet Service Provider level.
Basically, when the information being requested is pulled from the source somewhere on the globe, it
must pass through your local ISP such as Comcast or DirecTV before being displayed. The government
would require these ISP's to filter out blacklisted sites, basically a list of sites based on banning criteria.
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This method has been debated extensively in Australia. Proponents argued it as a way to prevent
children from viewing explicit content such as pornography. The legislation would have created a
mandatory filter for all houses where children live, and would allow for adults to opt out of the filter.
Opponents of the legislation argued that this "save the children" campaign was merely a front for
government censorship of the internet, citing that this blacklist would never be made public, and
completely legitimate sites may be subject to the ban. Sites including topics on abortion, graffiti,
euthanasia, and safe injecting procedures would all be subject to a ban. They argued that these topics
could be used as a learning resource and because they fall in the grey area, may never be available to the
public. These grievances against ISP filtering were made stronger when a supposed blacklist of the
already banned child pornography sites was leaked. Half of the websites were not related to child
pornography; some being YouTube links, Wikipedia entries, poker websites, fringe religions, Christian
websites, and the website of a Queensland Dentist. [Levin 2010] Opponents of these measures stated also
that no matter what measure the government would create, hackers and programmers would find a way to
circumvent these measures, making this legislation pointless. While the legislation was targeted to protect
children, Suzanne Dvorak of the Save the Children Fund stated that ‘Curbing Freedom of Speech will not
prevent the exploitation of children [on the internet].’ They pointed out that the best way to protect
children and citizens is to leave the power of decision in the hands of the people. Which begs the
question, is censorship of the internet a breach of freedom? Is it just another way for the government to
interfere in citizens day to day lives?
The fact of the matter is that the internet is almost completely privately owned by individuals
around the globe. Servers hosting information are maintained by companies, organizations and
individuals which makes the information stored on them property. In the United States, the most liberal
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when it comes to internet freedom, we are guaranteed by the first and fourth Amendments freedom of
speech protection against unlawful search and seizure. Because files and information on our computers is
property, are we not protected by the unlawful search and seizure clause? When we decide to share with
the masses our information and opinions, are we not protected by the Freedom of Speech clause? Does
this make censorship of the internet an attack on our basic rights?
The answer I have found to this question is yes and no. Notice in the search and seizure clause it
makes the statement "unlawful" search and seizure. This simply means that the government cannot take
information when the seizure of the information is not consistent with the laws of the United States. There
are laws in place, however, that would allow the government to censor and apprehend information on
servers inside the country. For instance, if one were to have illegally downloaded songs, movies, and files
they do not have a copyright license to, the government has every right to remove these files from ones
possession, as the individual is unlawfully in possession of them. If one were to have child pornography
on their computer, the government, under the laws of the United States, has every right to remove them.
For this reason, the government should have the right to remove illegal material from any server within its
borders. It does not however, have the right to limit information such as pornography, hate sites,
Euthanasia, abortion, or gambling sites, as these do not go against the laws of the U.S. As for the sharing
of this information and these opinions, the same rules apply. Those that are unlawful or are not the
property of the individual may be removed or filtered so that the laws of the United States are upheld.
How then, with the obstacles stated previously, can we censor those things on the internet that fall
under illegal activity, as the definition of illegal activity changes from nation to nation, and because the
internet has no qualms about crossing these borders. A new theory and method has been developed to in
particular tackle the problem of pornography available to minors, but can be reworked to fix the problem
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of illegal content in cyberspace. This method, called the West Coast Port System, uses a basic
understanding of how the internet works to make a very simple change. Basically the internet uses a
system of ports to send and receive information over the internet. Think about it as a system of highway
lanes; a fast, slow, and carpooling lane. Certain types of information travel in the fast lane, while others
travel in the carpooling lane. In contrast to a three lane highway, the internet has over 65,000 ports that
exist today, but only about 21 of them are used to any large degree. [Preston, 2012]There are independent
ports for email, government and military communications, and encrypted channels for money transfer and
credit card purchases. When you use the internet, the vast majority of information for web browsing
travels over a single port called port eighty. This port encompasses social networking, blogs, commercial
websites, children’s sites, and pornography. The plan calls for splitting up this general port eighty into a
community port and several other ports. It would leave all sites and domains accepted by society on port
eighty (community port), switch all legal yet unwanted sites to a second port, and encrypt sensitive
intellectual property and copyrighted material onto a third. In order to achieve this, each website would
need to be switched manually from one port to another.
One way to make the transition is to require that each site apply for the port to which it belongs.
Any site that does not apply or is not accepted will be blacklisted. Theoretically, the sites that do not
apply or are not accepted are illegal and therefore subject to censorship. The beauty of this plan is when a
site is accepted the change would have no effect on how the user views or accesses the site. The only
thing that changes is the port number, and not the URL or the content of the website. When buying
internet service, the user can choose only to purchase the ports they are interested in. A family for
example, can choose to use the community and encrypted ports and not the pornography and vulgar ports.
This can be done at the ISP level and allows for censorship of legal material to be decided by the
consumer.
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Since the Internet’s inception people and programs have hacked their way through firewalls and
filters, enabling themselves to slip through the cracks and evade defenses. While the West Coast Port
System is ambitious it falls short of a perfect solution. Illegal information will always be available
through the internet. The plague of cross borders internet disputes will always be a reality, no matter how
much filtering and censoring is done. The way that governments must tackle illegal activity across
borders is simply by cooperation. An organization or division of the United Nations must be developed to
handle disputes between governments when it comes to internet activity. For example, if a situation as
that of yahoo and France ever were to happen again, an international body, not individual nations, would
decide how to deal with the illegal or hurtful activity going on across borders. This is the only solution to
the problem because the internet is not nation by nation, but rather an international entity.
In conclusion internet censorship is lawful under specific circumstances and should for the most
part be utilized by all governments. The best plan for censorship is to only censor that which is illegal by
the government of a specific country, while inside the country. This can be achieved by basic filtering and
the West Coast Port System. When the matter becomes an international affair, the decision should not be
handled by the courts of individual countries, but by an international body. One of the creators of the
World Wide Web, Berners-Lee said it best, "Every powerful tool can be used for good or evil." The
internet is a powerful tool. The best way to improve it is to weed out what is illegal and separate the good
from the bad.
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References:
Martin Hilbert and Priscila López, "The World’s Technological Capacity to Store,
Communicate, and Compute Information", (April 2011), Science, 332(6025), 60-65. 10 Feb.
2011
Bauml, Jessica E. "It's a mad, mad Internet: globalization and the challenges presented by
Internet censorship." Federal Communications Law Journal May 2011: 697+. LegalTrac. Web.
26 Apr. 2012.
http://go.galegroup.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA259750068&v=2.1&
u=carl39591&it=r&p=LT&sw=w
Preston, Cheryl B. "Zoning the Internet: A New Approach to Protecting Children
Online." Brigham Young University Law Review 2007.6 (2007): 1417-69. ABI/INFORM
Complete. Web. 26 Apr. 2012.
Levin, Jane "Internet Censorship: The Debate Rages On". Screen education (St Kilda,
Vic.) (1449-857X), (59), p. 46. (01/01/2010). Spring 2010
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