Rebecca MacKinnon: Let's take back the Internet!

So I begin with an advertisement

inspired by George Orwell

that Apple ran in 1984.

(Video) Big Brother: We are one people

with one will, one resolve,

one cause.

Our enemies shall talk themselves to death,

and we will fight them with their own confusion.

We shall prevail.

Narrator: On January 24th,

Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.

And you'll see why 1984

won't be like "1984."

Rebecca MacKinnon: So the underlying message of this video

remains very powerful even today.

Technology created by innovative companies

will set us all free.

Fast-forward more than two decades:

Apple launches the iPhone in China

and censors the Dalai Lama out

along with several other politically sensitive applications

at the request of the Chinese government

for its Chinese app store.

The American political cartoonist

Mark Fiore

also had his satire application

censored in the United States

because some of Apple's staff

were concerned it would be offensive to some groups.

His app wasn't reinstated

until he won the Pulitzer Prize.

The German magazine Stern, a news magazine,

had its app censored

because the Apple nannies deemed it

to be a little bit too racy for their users,

and despite the fact that this magazine

is perfectly legal for sale

on newsstands throughout Germany.

And more controversially, recently,

Apple censored a Palestinian protest app

after the Israeli government voiced concerns

that it might be used to organize violent attacks.

So here's the thing.

We have a situation where private companies

are applying censorship standards

that are often quite arbitrary

and generally more narrow

than the free speech constitutional standards

that we have in democracies.

Or they're responding to censorship requests

by authoritarian regimes

that do not reflect consent of the governed.

Or they're responding to requests and concerns

by governments that have no jurisdiction

over many, or most, of the users and viewers

who are interacting with the content in question.

So here's the situation.

In a pre-Internet world,

sovereignty over our physical freedoms,

or lack thereof,

was controlled almost entirely

by nation-states.

But now we have this new layer

of private sovereignty

in cyberspace.

And their decisions about software coding,

engineering, design, terms of service

all act as a kind of law

that shapes what we can and cannot do with our digital lives.

And their sovereignties,

cross-cutting, globally interlinked,

can in some ways

challenge the sovereignties of nation-states

in very exciting ways,

but sometimes also act

to project and extend it

at a time when control

over what people can and cannot do

with information

has more effect than ever

on the exercise of power

in our physical world.

After all, even the leader of the free world

needs a little help from the sultan of Facebookistan

if he wants to get reelected next year.

And these platforms

were certainly very helpful

to activists in Tunisia and Egypt

this past spring and beyond.

As Wael Ghonim,

the Google-Egyptian-executive by day,

secret-Facebook-activist by night,

famously said to CNN

after Mubarak stepped down,

"If you want to liberate a society,

just give them the Internet."

But overthrowing a government is one thing

and building a stable democracy

is a bit more complicated.

On the left there's a photo taken by an Egyptian activist

who was part of the storming

of the Egyptian state security offices in March.

And many of the agents

shredded as many of the documents as they could

and left them behind in piles.

But some of the files were left behind intact,

and activists, some of them,

found their own surveillance dossiers

full of transcripts of their email exchanges,

their cellphone text message exchanges,

even Skype conversations.

And one activist actually found

a contract from a Western company

for the sale of surveillance technology

to the Egyptian security forces.

And Egyptian activists are assuming

that these technologies for surveillance

are still being used

by the transitional authorities running the networks there.

And in Tunisia, censorship actually began to return in May --

not nearly as extensively

as under President Ben Ali.

But you'll see here a blocked page

of what happens when you try to reach

certain Facebook pages and some other websites

that the transitional authorities

have determined might incite violence.

In protest over this,

blogger Slim Amamou,

who had been jailed under Ben Ali

and then became part of the transitional government

after the revolution,

he resigned in protest from the cabinet.

But there's been a lot of debate in Tunisia

about how to handle this kind of problem.

In fact, on Twitter,

there were a number of people who were supportive of the revolution

who said, "Well actually,

we do want democracy and free expression,

but there is some kinds of speech that need to be off-bounds

because it's too violent and it might be destabilizing for our democracy.

But the problem is,

how do you decide who is in power to make these decisions

and how do you make sure

that they do not abuse their power?

As Riadh Guerfali,

the veteran digital activist from Tunisia,

remarked over this incident,

"Before, things were simple:

you had the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other.

Today, things are a lot more subtle."

Welcome to democracy, our Tunisian and Egyptian friends.

The reality is

that even in democratic societies today,

we do not have good answers

for how you balance the need

for security and law enforcement on one hand

and protection of civil liberties

and free speech on the other

in our digital networks.

In fact, in the United States,

whatever you may think of Julian Assange,

even people who are not necessarily big fans of his

are very concerned about the way

in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks.

Amazon webhosting dropped Wikileaks as a customer

after receiving a complaint from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman,

despite the fact

that Wikileaks had not been charged,

let alone convicted,

of any crime.

So we assume

that the Internet is a border-busting technology.

This is a map of social networks worldwide,

and certainly Facebook has conquered much of the world --

which is either a good or a bad thing,

depending on how you like

the way Facebook manages its service.

But borders do persist

in some parts of cyberspace.

In Brazil and Japan,

it's for unique cultural and linguistic reasons.

But if you look at China, Vietnam

and a number of the former Soviet states,

what's happening there is more troubling.

You have a situation

where the relationship between government

and local social networking companies

is creating a situation

where, effectively,

the empowering potential of these platforms

is being constrained

because of these relationships

between companies and government.

Now in China,

you have the "great firewall," as it's well-known,

that blocks Facebook

and Twitter and now Google+

and many of the other overseas websites.

And that's done in part with the help from Western technology.

But that's only half of the story.

The other part of the story

are requirements that the Chinese government places

on all companies operating on the Chinese Internet,

known as a system of self-discipline.

In plain English, that means censorship and surveillance

of their users.

And this is a ceremony I actually attended in 2009

where the Internet Society of China presented awards

to the top 20 Chinese companies

that are best at exercising self-discipline --

i.e. policing their content.

And Robin Li, CEO of Baidu,

China's dominant search engine,

was one of the recipients.

In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet

and directly censor websites.

But this is a website called Rospil

that's an anti-corruption site.

And earlier this year,

there was a troubling incident

where people who had made donations to Rospil

through a payments processing system

called Yandex Money

suddenly received threatening phone calls

from members of a nationalist party

who had obtained details

about donors to Rospil

through members of the security services

who had somehow obtained this information

from people at Yandex Money.

This has a chilling effect

on people's ability to use the Internet

to hold government accountable.

So we have a situation in the world today

where in more and more countries

the relationship between citizens and governments

is mediated through the Internet,

which is comprised primarily

of privately owned and operated services.

So the important question, I think,

is not this debate over whether the Internet

is going to help the good guys more than the bad guys.

Of course, it's going to empower

whoever is most skilled at using the technology

and best understands the Internet

in comparison with whoever their adversary is.

The most urgent question we need to be asking today

is how do we make sure

that the Internet evolves

in a citizen-centric manner.

Because I think all of you will agree

that the only legitimate purpose of government

is to serve citizens,

and I would argue

that the only legitimate purpose of technology

is to improve our lives,

not to manipulate or enslave us.

So the question is,

we know how to hold government accountable.

We don't necessarily always do it very well,

but we have a sense of what the models are,

politically and institutionally, to do that.

How do you hold the sovereigns of cyberspace

accountable to the public interest

when most CEO's argue

that their main obligation

is to maximize shareholder profit?

And government regulation

often isn't helping all that much.

You have situations, for instance, in France

where president Sarkozy

tells the CEO's of Internet companies,

"We're the only legitimate representatives

of the public interest."

But then he goes and champions laws

like the infamous "three-strikes" law

that would disconnect citizens from the Internet

for file sharing,

which has been condemned by the U.N. Special Rapporteur

on Freedom of Expression

as being a disproportionate violation

of citizens' right to communications,

and has raised questions amongst civil society groups

about whether

some political representatives

are more interested in preserving

the interests of the entertainment industry

than they are in defending the rights of their citizens.

And here in the United Kingdom

there's also concern over

a law called the Digital Economy Act

that's placing more onus

on private intermediaries

to police citizen behavior.

So what we need to recognize

is that if we want to have

a citizen-centric Internet in the future,

we need a broader and more sustained

Internet freedom movement.

After all, companies didn't stop polluting groundwater

as a matter of course,

or employing 10-year-olds as a matter of course,

just because executives woke up one day

and decided it was the right thing to do.

It was the result of decades of sustained activism,

shareholder advocacy

and consumer advocacy.

Similarly, governments don't enact

intelligent environmental and labor laws

just because politicians wake up one day.

It's the result of very sustained and prolonged

political activism

that you get the right regulations,

and that you get the right corporate behavior.

We need to make the same approach

with the Internet.

We also are going to need

political innovation.

Eight hundred years ago, approximately,

the barons of England decided

that the Divine Right of Kings

was no longer working for them so well,

and they forced King John

to sign the Magna Carta,

which recognized

that even the king

who claimed to have divine rule

still had to abide by a basic set of rules.

This set off a cycle

of what we can call political innovation,

which led eventually to the idea of consent of the governed --

which was implemented for the first time

by that radical revolutionary government

in America across the pond.

So now we need to figure out

how to build consent of the networked.

And what does that look like?

At the moment, we still don't know.

But it's going to require innovation

that's not only going to need

to focus on politics,

on geopolitics,

but it's also going to need

to deal with questions

of business management, investor behavior,

consumer choice

and even software design and engineering.

Each and every one of us has a vital part to play

in building the kind of world

in which government and technology

serve the world's people and not the other way around.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)