English 102-21949

Should the Government Regulate the Internet?
Do we want the government censoring our stream of information? What about our rights to free speech or freedom of information? We would never think of censoring our television stations or allowing our phone lines to be tapped, so why would we want to allow the government to regulate the internet? When we use the internet, we expect to search for and receive results from a wide range of thoughts and ideas, where we go and who we listen to is our prerogative. Now with that power, comes the responsibility to understand that there will be extremes and to balance and weigh the credibility of the sources we are provided with. Freedom of speech and freedom of information are two ideals, no, rights that our country was founded upon. Regulation of the internet would infringe upon our first amendment rights and therefore cannot be considered.
We live in a great democracy with many rights and freedoms that other citizens of the world don’t have. Internet regulation is the process of the government monitoring and filtering where we can go and what we can see on the internet. This is already happening in countries like China, who have been very outspoken about the United States push to encourage open web policies (Clinton). So who is pushing for legislation like this in the United States? Not surprisingly the two pieces of legislation that were proposed earlier this year, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) were both brought to Congress with the backing of large corporations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Movie Picture Association of America (MPAA).
Internet piracy is the main reason that large corporations like the RIAA is pushing for this type of regulation of the internet. However bills like SOPA and PIPA went above and beyond the norms of controlling piracy or theft of intellectual property. The bills would have an entire site shut down immediately if found to have infringing material. This would be like closing a pawn shop because they had one item that was stolen instead of just rectifying the situation. The bill would require the Domain Name System (DNS) to remove all record of the site, making it unreachable. Credit card companies would also be required to sever their ties to the site, causing what may be a perfectly legitimate site to have all its revenue cut off (Weatherall). These bills took copyright infringement too far; there is already a system in place to protect intellectual property on the internet. The digital millennium copyright act (DMCA) has been in place and working well since 1998. We can see this at work on sites like YouTube, where a claim is filed and then YouTube keeps the webpage but replaces the video with a notice from the DMCA. The owner of the video is notified and he has a chance to rectify the situation, therefore in the case of internet piracy more regulation is not needed. Google was one of the largest opponents of these bills primarily because it didn’t directly impact their business. However they continue to support internet regulation that benefits them and keeps their competition at bay (Bollman). Net neutrality is the idea that all internet traffic be treated the same and not prioritized by how much we are paying, which is what Internet Service Providers (ISP) are opposed to. ISPs would like to charge us twice, once for our bandwidth and then a second charge for access to “premium” areas of the internet that they could create and control (Bollman). Companies like Google or Facebook could pay a premium for faster bandwidth and attract more people than their competition. This is a lot like FedEx charging one rate to ship your package and another higher rate to get it there faster. While net neutrality sounds good for the consumer, it limits market competition by leveling the playing field and creating network socialism by giving all internet traffic the same priority. Most of the legislation being proposed to our government is for net neutrality and is therefore bad for our economy.
The internet is a global communications stream, one that only works when we all agree upon the protocols. There are many standards and protocols that govern the internet and regulating it would require cooperation from them. The problem is that these bills that were proposed were by people who don’t understand how the internet works and the impact regulation would have on it (Jakobs). The other factor is that the standards are set up by large corporations and most times do not consider the small startups or even think about the single consumer.

Fig. 1. A cartoon shows the dangers of internet censorship and how it violates the First Amendment (Stein).
America is the land of capitalism but we also have laws that protect us from monopolies, which tend to do what benefits them and kills the ideals of free market society. Most forms of internet regulation are censorship because they restrict our access to information and freedom of speech (Robinson). Internet regulation would allow the government to track where we go on the internet and block our access to anywhere they deem wrong. We would not stand for the government putting a chip in us that allows them to track where we go or wiretapping our phones to keep tabs on our conversations. Both of these examples are clear violations of our rights yet they are being proposed by our congressmen. Internet regulation would also require search providers like Google, Bing, and Ask to filter our results to only show what the government deems appropriate. Giving this power to the government stops the checks and balances that were put in place to keep our government from doing what it wants. The government here in America works for the people not to oppress them.
The free and open nature of the internet helps to promote democracy and that is the primary reason you see a lot of opposition from countries like China who have instituted internet regulation. The government in China blocks all criticism of its government on the internet, something we would never allow here in America. In China, Google has launched a separate web search engine that filters results to the Chinese government’s information-suppression guidelines (Clemmitt). If we execute a Google search for Tiananmen Square, we will receive many images of tanks opposing demonstrators but the same search from within China would filter out all these photos. Searches within China would also filter out many websites that discuss democracy and any that oppose the government. The internet can be used to propagate democracy and inform the people that there are other options and give them a chance to band together to make a change.
Internet filtering also blocks creativity and stifles innovation. Students are being blocked from accessing multiple social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and even some search engines, on campuses nationwide. The way we learn is by using the technology professionals in various fields use every day: things like wikis, blogs, and digital content for the research, collaboration, and communication demanded by their jobs (Jansen). Blocking students from accessing these resources is putting them at a handicap when it comes time to work in the real world. We are doing our children an injustice by blocking them instead of teaching them to evaluate their resources and using the ones that are most appropriate for the task at hand. Anyone who has been on the internet knows that it is easy to stumble upon objectionable images and we can filter most of those out while still allowing access to all the other tools available on the internet. I acknowledge that this may still lead to the occasional image, cyber bullying, or hate speech but as I said, it is more important to educate our kids on how to deal with these than to just block them and pretend they are not there. Most internet filters at schools are easy to get around and a simple Google search will show them how, besides a lot of kids have full internet access at home anyways so filtering them at school is just sending the message that we don’t trust them.
While an unregulated internet is good for democracy, there is a lot of speculation on how useful it really is. We can use social networking sites to champion a cause, like democracy, but is that really making any impact? Just this week the Israeli government tweeted during their major attack on a Hamas controlled Gaza Strip. The government tweeted much of the attack as it happened and even linked to their YouTube video of a pinpoint air strike that killed Ahmed Jabari, the head of the Hamas military wing. I believe we would be foolish to ignore or even block social media site like Twitter or Facebook, in today’s society more and more people go to online sources for their news than anywhere else. The biggest benefit of the internet is that it is open and free for everyone to speak their opinion on any topic. This gives us unlimited resources when it comes to point of views and allows us to come to our own conclusions. Polls from CNN or US News reveal that most Americans get at least some of their news from the internet, while most claim when they do, they use more than just one source for their news.
The big take away from social media is that it is just that, “social.” The kinds of causes and grouping together of like minds is easy to do on a site like Facebook or Twitter, yet the depths of these relationships or causes can often be nothing more than a shallow, meaningless show of support and have little to do with actual change (Morozov). While I agree that a lot of people will “join” a cause on Facebook, and that does not necessarily translate to any progress toward that particular cause. The information is out there and more importantly, the information that yes there are a lot of people who side with this cause. Free speech and free thought should not be stopped and whatever means are available, should be used.
Iran is another country that has set up internet blocks to keep free speech from reaching the masses there. Earlier this month, the Iranian government decided to block YouTube, while trying to block YouTube, they ended up blocking all Gmail. This goes to show that selective blocking of websites or services are not an easy thing to pull off and most governments will end up coming down with the same heavy handed operation when trying to block sites. Here in the US, the war is on for internet piracy and this is what drives the internet regulation policy here. The US is a more tech savvy country than say, Iran but our government still has no understanding of the proper ways to go about regulating the internet. This was illustrated by the regulations that were proposed earlier this year. Both of them were very heavy handed and would have broken more things than they would have fixed. Why were they introduced if they were so incompetent that literally all the major player in internet commerce stepped up to oppose them? Big business, specifically the RIAA and MPAA, they proposed these to help boost their business because they refuse to keep up with emerging technology and the way that Americans want access to them. A big portion of innovation is the reduction of cost and with the development of the internet and the access we all have to streaming music and movies this has cut their profits and they don’t like that. Instead of changing their thinking and business model, the recording and movie industries have decided it would be easier to convince politicians, who don’t really understand the situation, to push legislation to help protect their business. It is shameful that these politicians would put their name on a bill that not only won’t work from a technical perspective but more importantly violates our first amendment rights. We put a call out to all our politicians to stop, think, and research the proposals and ideas of internet regulation before they push another piece of useless legislation like SOPA or PIPA. Stop and think about the American people, who you are supposed to be representing, and get out of the pockets of big business when it comes to internet regulation.

Works Cited
Bollman, Melissa. "Net neutrality, Google, and internet ethics." The Humanist Nov.-Dec. 2010: 6+. Academic OneFile. Web. 27 Oct. 2012.
Clemmitt, Marcia. "Controlling the Internet." CQ Researcher 12 May 2006: 409-32. Web. 27 Oct. 2012.
Clinton, Hillary Rodham. "Internet freedom and Human Rights: maintaining the practice of open communication and continuing the system of multi-stakeholder management of the internet can help advance the principles expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." Issues in Science and Technology 28.3 (2012): 45+. Academic OneFile. Web. 17 Oct. 2012.
Jakobs, Kai, Kai Reimers, and Thomas Wagner. "Standardising the internet of things: what the experts think." International Journal of IT Standards and Standardization Research 9.1 (2011): 63+. Academic OneFile. Web. 27 Oct. 2012.
Jansen, Barbara A. "Internet filtering 2.0: checking intellectual freedom and participative practices at the schoolhouse door." Knowledge Quest 39.1 (2010): 46+. Academic OneFile. Web. 20 Oct. 2012.
Morozov, Evgeny. The net delusion, the dark side of internet freedom. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011. Print.
Robinson, Christy Hall. "Gag Me With a Law; What media 'fairness' and 'net neutrality' really mean." The Weekly Standard 3 Nov. 2008. Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Web. 24 Oct. 2012.
Stein, Ed. Cartoon. Edsteinink.comWeb. 23 Nov 2012.
Weatherall, Kimberlee. "The new (old) war on copyright infringement, and how context is opening new regulatory possibilities." Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy May 2012: 110+. Academic OneFile. Web. 17 Oct. 2012.