From Every Mountaintop, Let Freedom Ring

The World Summit on the Information Society meets in Tunis this week to attempt to place the Internet under international controls.

Is freedom divisible? Less and less so, as national and individual actors have the technology and ease to slip near and across borders. Borders are less barriers today than weakening filters.

I participated (my contribution cross-posted at the American Enterprise Online) in an online symposium last week on Globalization and War at ZenPundit blog. The blogmeister summed up the various contributions thusly:

“War is slipping out of the exclusive grasp of the state and into the hands of transnational and subnational actors, ‘global guerillas’ and even superempowered individuals…Today, the Fuhrer could accomplish widespread ruin with fewer followers than marched with him in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch….Right now America is not leveraging its advantages in the war on terror, not even…in the sphere of information and media, a field we pioneered. Our enormous reserves of ‘softpower’ go untapped or are being turned against us.”

Countering this, however ineptly or scattered, is the greatest force for countering and exposing state or movement tyrannies, the Internet.

Yesterday’s London Times quotes me, with respect to the effort to place control of the Internet under U.N. control:

“ ‘This issue, this outrageous putsch attempt, deserves an uproar heard around the world on the internet,’ wrote blogger Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project. He criticized the EU for its ties to ‘such stalwarts of smothering internet freedom as China, Cuba, Iran.’ ”

The London Times also quotes two leftist bloggers, one calling this “the US conservative spin machine turning this into a battle between the democracy-loving US Government protecting the internet from censorship from the dictators and thugs who run the UN,” and another, the leading leftist blogger Markos Moulitas of Daily Kos, saying, the U.S.’ “international belligerence” undermines the world’s faith that the U.S. should regulate a “global medium.” The U.S., unmentioned, has not regulated, but invested in and maintained a completely open forum, anathema to tyrants and those who travel alongside.

Freedom House is a multi-generational respected monitor of freedom around the world, with a wider agenda than just reflexively endorsing whatever is anti-U.S. Its director of research, Arch Puddington, wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post:

“Some of the most shameful U.N. episodes – particularly regarding freedom issues – have occurred because the world’s democracies were outwitted by a coalition of the most repressive regimes – the very coalition that is taking shape over Internet control….It is no secret why Iran, China and Cuba are lobbying so desperately to replace ICANN [the central technical hub – in the U.S. – for maintaining a worldwide web]: The Internet has proven a potent weapon against state repression….It nullifies totalitarian schemes to monopolize the airwaves.”

Some, who have no cotton for the gang of U.N. repressors, such as Brian Carney of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, remark: “The U.S. is making apocalyptic predictions of what the U.N. would do if given control. These predictions are probably optimistic; U.N. control would be a disaster.” He points out that another alternative would be for the worldwide web to fragment into totally repressed segments, as it presently only partially is, in China and its cohorts in state control, but at least they wouldn’t have the “shelter” of a U.N. approval.

Little comfort for the billions of people, striving for a freer society, cut off from encouragement and interaction with others in the world, to relegate them to a closed information prison.

The antagonists of freedom are never idle. They scheme individually and coalesce around targets of opportunity. Profiteers without conscience facilitate, as has Cisco, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google, in selling China the technology for internet repression. Those either feeling overly comfortable in their own freedom, or with other agendas, sit idly by as the designs of the purposeful proceed. Only concerted counteractions from those who know the fetid breath of tyranny or who are conscious of the repeated lessons of failing to act, resist, alert and can turn the tide.