Hillary Clinton Eyes Global Internet Freedom; Censorship Seen Spreading Globally

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will announce a policy to address global access issues in an uncensored Internet during her address on Internet freedom Thursday, said Alec Ross, Clinton’s senior innovation adviser, at a New America Foundation panel Wednesday. Clinton will address the Google censorship issue in China but won’t stop there, he said.

Clinton will talk about several initiatives and a policy framework to encourage online freedom worldwide, Ross said. Internet freedom isn’t just about freedom of expression, he said, saying it’s about “access to information based on where you live.” Clinton’s proposals will address China censorship, but China is far from the only place where the government is known to interfere with online access, Ross said, saying about 31 percent of the world’s population is in countries where there is some Internet censorship. “It’s something that’s been of a great deal of concern because it really exists at the convergence of economic issues, human rights issues and security issues,” Ross said.

The Obama Administration understands that the Google- China situation is primarily a dispute between a private company and a foreign government, though “we have asked for an explanation,” Ross said. “We have had conversations over the years where we have made clear our concerns about the issue,” he said. “We're taking this very seriously but the State Department isn’t the foreign policy arm of Google,” he said. Google’s threats to shut down its China-based site due to censorship and cyber-attacks may prove more harmful to China than to Google, said Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu. He said what has been dubbed “The Great Firewall of China” can also be viewed as a trade barrier, despite the lure of entering the lucrative Chinese market. In China, the media is a regulated industry and Internet companies aren’t always self-aware that they are media companies too, Wu said.

Blocking a site like Google or eBay can be considered a barrier to trade in information services, Wu said, saying it’s an open question of how far you can develop your information sector while continuing to be censorious. Wu questioned whether what happens in China would be a model for the Internet elsewhere: “I think that we are seeing the world moving away from the global Internet to a series of national networks,” he said. It’s a matter of choice how global or un-global the Internet is and how interconnected it is, he said. Countries do have the power to choose and do it generally through the law, he said.

Threats to the open Internet are growing globally, said Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow with the Open Society Institute. Google is making a stand about global Internet, she said. Cyber-attacks have occurred more frequently in places like Russia and Eastern Europe than in China, and such attacks are increasingly being used against activists everywhere, said Evgeny Morozov, a Yahoo Fellow at Georgetown University. Many organizations and activists worldwide are now subject to these attacks, he said, saying they're seeing it as a new form of censorship. Meanwhile, “people think net neutrality and censorship may be unrelated,” Wu said, “but the net neutrality debates are basically debates over what the Internet should be and how open and interconnected it should be.”