Whose Values

February 19

The Internet is often thought of as one place, as in Barlow’s framing of “our world” in the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. But we have already seen that this framing does not play out quite so cleanly. And nor should it, necessarily, because the Internet’s global clientele represent a wide mix of values, both in abstract principles and practical solutions for when those principles collide. This class looks at that issue through the lens of a few specific examples, and starts us toward a larger question: Can we fit all of our different values onto the same Internet?

Readings

• The Economist, The Future of the Internet: A Virtual Counter-Revolution

• Hal Roberts et al., The Evolving Landscape of Internet Control

• Biz Stone and Alex Macgillivary, The Tweets Must Flow and The Tweets Still Must Flow

• Rachel Whetstone, Free Expression and Controversial Content on the Web

• Eliza Krigman, Next Battle over Net Ramps Up Worldwide (Politico)

• Case Study: The Innocence of Muslims

• Wikipedia, The Innocence of Muslims

• Jillian York, Should Google Censor an Anti-Islam Video?

• Ryan Budish, Little “i” Internet: The “Innocence of Muslims” Video’s Impact on Free Speech

• Andy Sellars, The Structural Weakness of Internet Speech

Optional Readings

• Anne-Marie Slaughter, Adapting U.S. Policy in a Changing International System

• Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey, Reluctant Gatekeepers: Corporate Ethics on a Filtered Internet (from Access Denied)

• Nate Anderson, Explainer: How Can the US Seize a “Hong Kong site” like Megaupload?

Class Discussion

Please remember to sign your postings by adding four tildes (~~~~) to the end of your contribution. This will automatically add your username and the date/time of your post, like so: Asellars 15:29, 21 January 2013 (EST)

I found Andy Sellars, 'The Structural Weakness of Internet Speech', article to contain an interesting analysis on the role that the US legal regime governing free speech should play in censorship of the internet. While I agreed with a number of his concerns, I disagree with his proposition that it is 'very' hard to change the constitutional law in the US governing free speech (in particular hate speech). While he, and many other Americans, take the position that the US constitution protects hate speech and that it would be 'very, very hard' to change the law, I do not agree with this. I concede that the wording of the first amendment would appear to place strict limits on the governments interference with speech in general, however, this has not stopped the government from restricting numerous forms of speech such as commercial expression, libel, pornography, child pornography, fraud, intellectual property theft, national security, and incitement to violence. If SCOTUS was inclined to change the laws on hate speech they would be able to do so without resort to formal constitutional amendment.

I also appreciate his point that we now have behemoth corporations making the decisions about whether to censor a citizens opinions. Youtube can remove videos at will and Google can rank pages it disagrees with down into the netherworlds of irrelevance on its search results. Google has done this in the past, leaving up derogatory pages about Rick Santorum, while downgraded pages it disagrees with for whatever reason. Joshywonder 15:40, 12 February 2013 (EST)

Thanks for the comment, Josh. (And yes, Andy Sellars from here is me, just as the article by Ryan Budish is the same Ryan.) I would argue that it is still difficult to change the US Constitution, even if we have majority support for a particular position (e.g. hate speech, where I think there is a growing consensus though certainly not unanimous support). Amending the constitution requires both massive turnout and very-high-percentage (66-75%) support. See this article for more. Where the Supreme Court has allowed exceptions has been places where the First Amendment has always been considered to be inapplicable - obscenity, defamation, "fighting words," and a few other places - and these are clearly defined with specific definitions that have evolved form the doctrine. In the words of the Supreme Court, "[o]ur Constitution forecloses any attempt to revise that judgment simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it," and doesn't add categories to the list as a general rule. While they could change their mind, they have entrenched in this position for all of their history, and would face all sorts of collateral challenges should they start to arbitrarily decide what is an is not constitutional.

I am also not sure that we have seen a proven example where Google had down-ranked a page to serve its own interest, but that's beside the point of my article. My concern is that they could, and there's not much we could do about it. asellars 18:34, 12 February 2013 (EST)