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Digital Communities
Industry Members
"Great Firewall of Europe" Under Consideration
May 27, 2011 By Indrajit Basu
Talk of Internet censorship and the first thing that comes to mind is the Great Firewall of China. With a wide variety of laws and administrative regulation, a vast security network, and compliant Internet service providers and companies including foreign ones, Beijing keeps the mainland's Net on a leash; or at least limits the ordinary Internet user. The firewall is supposedly quite ineffective, however, for anyone with technical skills who is determined to get around it.
If the Council of the European Union's Law Enforcement Working Party (LEWP), however, has its way, Europe too could raise a similar firewall.
In a secret February meeting the LEWP -- a forum for cooperation on issues such as counter terrorism, customs and fraud -- tabled a proposal to create a "Great Firewall of Europe" by blocking "illicit" Web material with the intention to "to propose concrete measures towards creating a single secure European cyberspace."
According to the minutes of the meeting, the goal is to create a “virtual Schengen Border" and "virtual access points.” This border would ring Europe and block "illicit content" on a continental scale. In other words, it wants to enforce a law that would prevent Internet users from accessing illicit content on the basis of an EU blacklist through the cooperation of ISPs.
Anti-censorship campaigners compared the plan to China’s notorious system for controlling citizens’ access to blogs, news websites and social networking services.
Although this proposal has raised a hue and cry from civil liberties group all around the continent, what needs to be noted is that it is just a proposal. Chances are that as legislation or as a formal enforcement, Virtual Schengen Border may never see the light of day.
For, while it is far easier for authoritarian regimes to institute such a firewall, it is a completely different ballgame for democracies. There are too many powerful forces to oppose it thereby making it very hard to enforce.
And therein lies a bigger problem.
Listen to what Glyn Moody, a UK-based advocate of openness online, and a veteran in IT, has to say;
“I do not think it is possible to put together a formal firewall for Europe. But what will happen is that the European Council and the governments will put pressure on ISPs to voluntarily block what they call illicit sites ... The advantage in a formal legislation is that it could be challenged. It is quite easy to fight and show that it is harmful. But the danger in informal agreements is that one, you do not know it is in place and two, you can’t challenge because it is informal. So in some ways the second is more insidious because it is much harder to fight.”
Incidentally according to Moody, the UK government has already started directing its ISPs to informally block some sites. Reports suggest French President Sarkozy too prefers to exercise some amount of control on the Internet. The French administration, it appears, is unhappy about the independence of the Internet and says it must be "civilized."
Informal firewalls, in fact, carry another danger; that of creeping censorship. Once such informal firewalls are set up, they could be easily extended to sites that may not be dealing with what they were initially intended for. For instance, while a government can start with blocking, say, sites dealing with pornography or terrorism, slowly that censorship could extend to include inconvenient sites -- like anti-government blogs, and the like.
Some of the other concerns raised by critics are that there is no clarification as to what "illicit content" means. Broadband providers such as Malcolm Hutty, head of public affairs at LINX, a cooperative of British ISPs also says that the plan appears “ill thought-out” and “confused” since network-level filtering of the type proposed has been proven ineffective.
Joe McNamee, advocacy coordinator, European Digital Rights, a Brussels-based international non-profit association that defends civil rights in the information society, finds this proposal absurd. “Most absurd of all [is that] -- despite all of the costs in terms of democracy, freedom of speech and even the economy -- there is no analysis of any benefit or expected benefit," he said.
Nevertheless, governments of many democracies, including the developed ones, may claim that they are much superior in terms of online freedom compared to authoritarian countries. But according to Moody, the fact is, many democratic governments, too, are trying to bring the Net under their thumbs.
“There are two things happening,” he says. “One, many governments have found that that there are stuffs on the Internet that people do not like and that is true because there are quite a few things the many wish aren’t there. And the government therefore, feels some pressure to doing something about it.
“But more than that," he continued, "they are using that as a perfect excuse to take control of the Internet. After all, government can easily say they are not actually taking control of the Internet. They are just trying to protect people from the dangerous sites and in the process, use that as an excuse for taming this very inconvenient beast that is the Internet.”
Technology may the one of the greatest enablers of good things in life, but even until recently, it was mainly a phenomenon that benefited the more resourceful section of the world. That's changing though. Thanks to its constant evolution in the last few years, technology, particularly digital technologies, have ceased to be the privilege of a select few. From a hungry child in Niger, to the downtrodden lavatory cleaner in India, to the lonely billionaire widower living in a swanky Manhattan apartment, digital technologies are radically changing the lives of all these days.
As an international correspondent for Digital Communities, I have covered the power that ICT wields, particularly over the inhabitants of the developing world. But often a 1200-word feature does not bring forth the magic of ICT fast enough. My endeavor in this space would be to do just that; highlight some notable ICT-related developments as fast as I can.
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