MCLC: Consent of the Networked review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Consent of the Networked review
***********************************************************

Source: China Beat (4/17/12): http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=4238

Review: Consent of the Networked
By Anne Henochowicz

The last two years have seen much talk about the explosion of social media
as a tool of real change, most notably during the Arab Spring. Tunisia¹s
and Egypt¹s revolutions were powered by Twitter and Facebook. Though these
sites are blocked in China, Sina¹s microblogging platform Weibo has also
changed the political game in that country, forcing government
accountability after last summer¹s high-speed train crash in Wenzhou and
contributing to the very public downfall of former Chongqing Party
Secretary Bo Xilai. Weibo¹s power may also lead to its demise. After
rumors of a coup attempt spread recently, the comment function on posts
was disabled from March 31 through April 3
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/04/beijing-cracks-down-on-web-commentary
/>.

The rise of Weibo, concurrent with a tightening of restrictions on
activists, has focused the world¹s attention on Chinese social media. The
cat-and-mouse game Chinese ³netizens² play with the censors has made it
onto the pages of the New York Times
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/the-dangerous-politics-of-inter
net-humor-in-china.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all>, The Economist
<http://www.economist.com/node/21550333>, and the International Herald
Tribune 
<http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/watch-your-language-and-in-
china-they-do/>. What is so often missing, though, from the discussion of
Internet freedom in China, as in the Middle East, is the role that ³free
world² business and politics plays in the mechanisms of censorship.

Rebecca MacKinnon¹s Consent of the Networked
<http://consentofthenetworked.com/> is a synthesis of the global debate
over Internet freedom. MacKinnon has extensive journalistic experience in
China, but her book encompasses the breadth of Internet issues worldwide.
The CNN Beijing bureau chief from 1998-2001, MacKinnon went on to become a
fellow at Harvard¹s Kennedy School of Government, and later the Berkman
Center for Internet and Society. She is the co-founder of Global Voices,
an international citizen journalist blog. She is currently a fellow at the
New America Foundation and on the Global Network Initiative¹s board of
directors.

MacKinnon argues that Internet freedom depends on the ³consent of the
networked.² Like John Locke¹s consent of the governed, the denizens of the
Internet, its ³netizens,² relinquish a certain amount of personal freedom
in exchange for security. In the physical world, we accept that we need
the police to protect us from harm. If the police are too weak, we don¹t
feel safe in public. But if the police have too much power, they bring a
new kind of danger into our lives. Like real-world institutions, our
virtual hegemons should guarantee our freedoms, not encroach on them.

The trouble with the Internet is that the kingdoms governing it‹Facebook,
Google, Yahoo‹make their own rules. They are not accountable to netizens.
They may apply their laws arbitrarily or change them without warning.
Facebook, for example, has a loosely-enforced real-name policy. Zhao Jing,
the Beijing blogger and journalist who goes by the pen name Michael Anti,
found his Facebook account shuttered in 2011 for violation of the
company¹s real-name policy. But the same policy has not been applied to
Beast, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg¹s dog.

Zuckerberg argues that netizens should have nothing to hide online. But
control over how much personal information exists about us online is vital
to our real-world safety, whether we inhabit democracies or authoritarian
regimes. Under South Korea¹s short-lived real-identification registration
requirement, netizens¹ identities on the blogging platform Daum, YouTube,
and other sites were tied to real names, ID numbers, and addresses. This
allowed for the 2009 arrest of Park Dae-sung for ³spreading false
information to harm the public interest,² even though he blogged under a
pseudonym. The real-name regulations remained until July 2011, when the
national ID numbers of of about 35 million people were stolen from a
popular Korean Web portal.

China¹s four biggest microblogging platforms, including Sina Weibo, are
phasing in real-ID requirements as of March 16. Users can keep their
unregistered accounts, but eventually will not be able to post without
giving their real names and mobile phone numbers. This not only threatens
Weibo¹s freewheeling atmosphere, but also leaves users vulnerable to
identity theft.

It is easy to pin all of the on blame the Chinese government. Twitter,
Facebook, YouTube and Google all had their time in China, before some
³mass incident² or conflict between the company and the government threw
it on the other side of the Great Firewall. But we should not forget that
American Internet and technology companies have also played a role in
online censorship. Perhaps the most egregious example is the case of
journalist Shi Tao, arrested in 2004 after sending an email from his Yahoo
account to the organization Democracy Forum about directives for reporters
leading up to June 4. At the Beijing state security bureau¹s request,
Yahoo turned in all of Shi¹s ³login times, corresponding IP addresses, and
relevant email content.² Shi is still serving his jail sentence.

In the wake of Shi¹s conviction, Yahoo made significant changes to its
corporate policy to keep similar human rights violations from happening
again. MacKinnon is not anti-corporation or anti-regulation, and makes a
point of talking about the efforts some governments and Internet companies
have made to protect netizens. She also emphasizes the role netizens in
the free world can play in promoting a global open Internet. While
circumvention software to ³climb the wall,² anonymizers, and other tools
made in the Western world for people living with a less-than-free Internet
have their place, we can do the most good for netizens worldwide by making
Internet companies at home accountable to us.

American netizens rose to the task earlier this year in their petition
against the House¹s SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and the Senate¹s PIPA
(Protect IP Act), bills which would punish Web platforms allowing
copyrighted material to be shared and force Internet service providers and
search engines to block access to ³rogue websites.² On January 18,
Wikipedia and other websites coordinated a blackout in protest. The
blackouts, petitions, and rallies influenced the postponement of hearings
on both bills.

There is plenty of talk about what is censored online, but not nearly
enough about how. To understand why online conversations evolve as they do
in China‹or Iran, or the US‹we need to understand the mechanisms that
support those conversations. And to make the Internet free for everyone,
we need to start at home.

Anne Henochowicz is the translation coordinator for China Digital Times.
She earned her masters in Chinese literature and folklore from The Ohio
State University. She lives in Washington, D.C. You can reach her on
Twitter @murasakint.