Gains Being Made on Keeping Internet Open, Says State Department Official

The U.S. State Department’s focus on keeping the Internet open is much bigger than just Google and China, said Alex Ross, senior adviser on innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on C-SPAN’s The Communicators, in an interview to be broadcast this weekend. But Ross also said he sees signs that Clinton’s stand in favor of Internet freedom made in a Jan. 21 speech is bearing fruit.

The U.S. has since had “candid, constructive conversations” with the Chinese government, Ross said. “Putting Google aside for a moment … what matters far more than one company and even one country is how we can engage diplomatically,” he said. “This is now something that’s at the table diplomatically. I'm hopeful, I'm optimistic, that there will be progress in the years ahead in this area."

Ross said the threats to a free Internet extend well beyond China. “Everybody focuses on Iran, everybody focuses on China, but it’s the case in dozens of countries where the Internet is increasingly looking like an intranet,” he said. Clinton’s speech was a critical development, Ross said. “What she made clear was that American values, related to things like the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, the freedom of the press, these things that we have valued for not just decades but centuries, must extend into the digital age."

An open Internet is complicated, raising security, economic and human rights issues, Ross said. “A lot of this comes down to will. If a government has the will to completely shut down its network then it’s very hard to work around this,” he said. “One of the things that Secretary Clinton said in her Internet freedom speech … was that we weren’t going to just sit back and allow this to happen."

Representatives from 19 telcos, information technology and Internet companies met at the State Department for the first time last month in an expanded meeting of the newly-renamed NetFreedom Task Force. Ross said the work of that committee will be critical. Communications companies have similar desires, he said. “What they want is clarity, what they want is for there to be a sense of community standards that they can all work within,” he said. “What they want to do is work with us on what the rules of the road are and not be told what the rules are and what they don’t have to guess at what they are."

Ross said it was too early to say what kinds of rules the group will devise. “It’s chapter one, page one. This is the beginning of a process. We've had one meeting on this,” he said. “It would be presumptuous of me to say what the specific norms will be, what the standards will be."

Ross said the State Department has been active elsewhere behind the scenes on communications issues. For example, he said, he has been working with Mexican officials to create a program allowing Mexican citizens to anonymously report crime via text message. The goal is to “restore anonymity, transparency and a little bit of accountability back into crime fighting.” In the Congo, the department has focused on helping establish mobile banking. “One of the things that we know is cash-based economies are ones with disproportionately high levels of crime and corruption,” he said. Another program uses mobile technology to help protect women and children. “Remarkably, in a place with per capita GDP of $184, there is actually a fairly robust wireless telecommunications infrastructure,” he said. “We're trying to use that to provide information directly to women and families so that they can protect themselves when there are bad guys nearby, so that they can be less vulnerable to predation by militias, by people who would sexually, violently exploit them."

Ross was a key technology adviser to the Obama presidential campaign in 2008, working under now FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.