Monthly Archives: July 2012

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/9/2012 2:38:51 PM Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is the latest big name to sign the Declaration of Internet Freedom, according to backer Free Press. His name was even listed first online among individual signers, even though the rest of the list was alphabetical.

It is no big surprise that Rep. Issa would sign on. Many of the same groups and individuals who opposed online piracy legislation, citing threats to Internet "freedom," are signatories to the declaration. Issa was one of the strongest opponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the House bill scrapped after Internet powerhouses banded together to stop it.

"It is crucial that we secure the principles outlined in the Declaration of Internet Freedom," said Issa in a statement, "to defend against those who seek to interfere and disrupt our vibrant online community and the economic growth it supports." He also put in a plug for his own, similar, Citizen's Digital Bill of Rights.

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Issa Signs Internet Freedom Declaration

Freedom of religion is a right, but more than just the right to attend the church of our choice. It also assures that government does not force anyone to act contrary to their conscience. The Health and Human Services Act violates this right.

Catholics believe that sexuality is a gift, offering us an amazing opportunity to participate in Gods creative power. Use of contraception reduces this beautiful gift to a mere act of pleasure, one in which our human desires and selfishness are deemed more important than the higher order of Gods plan. The HHSA mandates that all insurance policies provide coverage for contraception, forcing the Catholic Church and its affiliates (social services, hospitals, schools/colleges) to act in direct contradiction to their beliefs.

The HHSA would also require the Catholic Church to provide coverage for some abortive services. Worse than being asked to sanction the artificial prevention of a pregnancy, is asking Catholics to sanction the termination of an innocent human life. We believe that from the moment a life begins at conception, no one has the right to take that life except the author of life himself. Pro-choice gives an unborn baby no choice. No Catholic (or person of conscience) can sanction, or pay for, that.

Freedom is intended to foster dignity, not encourage depravity. Whose dignity is fostered by either contraception or abortion? I am a Catholic, proud that my faith teaches that Gods laws supersede those of humans. I applaud our leaders for taking this unpopular, yet unwavering, stand.

In doing so, they are not imposing judgment or beliefs on anyone. Rather they are asking that the standards of the world not be imposed on us. May God give us the grace to continue to show his compassion to individuals, while remaining uncompromising in our principles.

GERRY MacLEOD

Greenville

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Letter: Act violates freedom of religion

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/9/2012 10:35:34 AM The United Nations Human Rights Council concluded its meeting last week with a raft of resolutions, including one supporting Internet expression as a basic human right and promoting broadband deployment.

In a resolution on "the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the Internet," the UN council affirmed that "[T]he same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression." The resolution "calls upon all States to promote and facilitate access to the Internet and decides to continue its consideration of how the Internet can be an important tool for development and for exercising human rights."

The U.S. has already made promoting Internet freedom internationally a part of its foreign policy goals, outlined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a speech in 2010, in which she likened the freedom to connect to the Internet to freedom of assembly during a speech that mirrored the Four Freedoms speech of Franklin Roosevelt.

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UN: Internet Freedom Is a Human Right

Left unsaid in a high-profile new document about Internet's principles is whose interests it represents--and how they'll be backed.

Junius Brutus Stearns/Wikimedia Commons

Last week, a collection of Internet bold-faced names rolled out a Declaration of Internet Freedom. Groups like the advocacy organization Free Press and the New America Foundation's Open Technologies Institute took the lead on its creation, and the first batch of signatories included the likes of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Harvard Law School professor and former Obama administration official Susan Crawford, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing, Internet pioneer and Google evangelist Vint Cerf, Ben Huh of ICanHasCheezburger.com and related sites, and a raft of other groups and individuals who make good livings on or around the Internet. The plan is for the public to debate, edit, and remix the document's core principles, "as only the Internet makes possible," as two of the planners put it. But here's what the Declaration of Internet Freedom held at its creation:

We stand for a free and open Internet.

We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles:

With bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), treaties like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement(ACTA), and holidays like Independence Day (July 4th) in the news, it's an opportune time for a project like this. It's also the right time to poke at its meaning. For one thing, as Atlantic Wire's Rebecca Greenfield pointed out, the declaration's bare-bones founding principles are strikingly vague. The application of "defend[ing] everyone's ability to control how their data and devices are used" is going to get very complicated, very quickly, especially when so many of the social platforms and tools that Internet users love, like Facebook and Google, are built on a trade-off between data and access. And yet at the same time, the principles are easy to get behind. Few people think what they're doing is censorship, and it's a decent bet everyone from AT&T to the Motion Picture Association of America to even the Chinese government believes that they're abiding by some version of "openness."

But there's something else about the Declaration of Internet Freedom project that jumps out. On a press call announcing the declaration, tech policy activist and Techdirt publisher Mike Masnick, a signatory, talked about the fact that the document was an attempt to set forth the principles of "the wider Internet community." It makes you wonder how a project like this goes about establishing that it is, indeed, somehow representative of something bigger than a large handful of Internet luminaries and advocacy groups whose names are on the document.

In other words, when you write a Declaration of Internet Freedom, who's "we"? And what leverage do they bring to bear?

At the risk of being pedantic, historically declarations have tended to be things that (a) represent some defined body and (b) have some way of being enforced. Take the Declaration of Independence. It was "the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America," as represented in the rebellious Second Continental Congress. (Granted, the only folks represented were well-off white men.) For enforcement, the states had armed revolution at the ready. For the Virginia Declaration of Rights drafted by George Mason with an assist from James Madison -- and from which the Declaration of Independence was in part remixed -- was "made by the representatives of the good people of Virginia," and the means of upholding it was, well, active resistance against the British. The post-World War II Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a product of the United Nations' General Assembly. For member nations, enforcement happens in the U.N., though things are admittedly fuzzier for non-member countries. If the Declaration of Internet Freedom's constituency is the several dozen people and groups listed at launch, that's not nothing -- but it is limited. With notable exceptions, the signers on the document are clustered on the coasts of the United States. Of course, more signers will come, but what that means isn't entirely clear. Representative government has its imperfections, but it generally also has its rules for amassing authority laid out for all to see. With something like the Declaration of Internet Freedom, it's trickier to track what a presumption of authority might be based on.

When the questions of representative participation and enforcement are put to the backers of the declaration, their answers suggest that they're still very much in the thinking-things-through stage. Techdirt's Masnick suggests that the declaration is about articulating norms that, when violated, "create a natural enforcement mechanism" like the mass public outrage that greeted SOPA and PIPA in the United States and ACTA across the globe. That dynamic "doesn't need to be written into the principles or in any particular regulation," argues Masnick. "[It's] just the recognition that the public accepts these things and that any effort to go against them will be opposed." For Free Press's Internet campaign director Josh Levy, the focus is on boosting the public's watchdogging of the rules governing the Internet.* (Thus the "We support transparency and participatory processes for making Internet policy" language in the declaration.) "They can't conduct business as usual when there are a million eyes watching them," holds Levy. "They need to know that they're being watched so that they can no longer try to conduct things behind closed doors, with special interests."

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Defining the 'We' in the Declaration of Internet Freedom