Last Week's Blackout
As any student who has been attempting to watch any TV on the internet this week will know, Megavideo has been shut down. While there is a degree of sadness, not to mention annoyance knowing that the words “You have already watched 72 minutes of Megavideo today” will never cross our screens again, this minor frustration is only the tip of an iceberg that might succeed in permanently censoring the internet.
This movement towards censoring the internet has been articulated recently as Hollywood pushed for new legislation to stop American citizens from being able to access pirated material through the introduction of bills SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act). These bills aim to stop websites that contain pirated material from making money by halting payment networks like PayPal and MasterCard from processing payments to such sites or by stopping their revenue from advertisements. The second element of these bills is where it begins to really tamper with internet access. They aim to stop people from reaching any pirated material that remains on the internet by blocking the domain names, which endangers the freedom of speech of non-pirates using the web. For example, the domain name blogspot is shared by many people who use it as a platform to communicate across the web. However, under this legislation, one blogger posting pirated material could put the whole site in jeopardy. It also makes large websites responsible for the content posted by their users, putting them in a vulnerable position to be sued and have to shut down.
If you were trying to write an essay last week you might also have noticed that Wikipedia blacked out its English language site in protest to these acts, while similar censorship protests took place across the internet on websites from Greenpeace to Google. Thanks to this high level of resistance, both bills have been put on the backburner for now.
In the meantime, however, there are some new threats coming through in the form of ACTA (Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement) and HR 1981 (Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act). ACTA should be a matter of concern to all internet users. The terms of the treaty have not yet been finalised and little is known about the agreement generally as there has been so little publicity and most of the meetings have taken place in secret. However, the preliminary documents published on Wikileaks suggest that ACTA would remove the legal safeguards for internet service providers which protect them from liability for the actions of their subscribers. Therefore, they would have no choice but to comply with privacy invasions.
Meanwhile HR 1981 is being argued for under the pretence of protecting children from internet paedophiles, what it will entail in practice is the monitoring of all internet usage by customers of any given internet service provider to be kept on record for at least one year. Obviously child protection is an important issue, but this legislation follows a “guilty until proven innocent” logic as every website you access will be logged, regardless of whether there is any just reason to do so.
Hopefully ACTA and HR 1981 will receive the same extensive media coverage as SOPA and PIPA and will therefore inspire similar protest action. Protests against HR 1981 have already picked up steam in the USA so we can only hope that this trend of activism continues and eventually stops this attack on our internet freedom.
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