Cover Story
Internet Momma in
China vs India vs US
Recent reproaches of the Indian government have opened a can of worms among the content creators. India should hence come up with a policy that caters to all, without disrupting harmony and rights
AKANKSHA PRASAD
akankshap@cybermedia.co.in
I
n 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee started WWW, it was all about consuming static content, and authority of that content was in the hands of a few media corps or educational institutions. In a matter of few years, the trend changed, information was no more static. It was the world of Web 2.0 which enabled everyone to create content, followed by social networking which allowed content creators to spread their voice in almost the speed of light.
Moral Policing
Eventually, more content creation and sharing meant more strength to voice or an unrestrained strength to the voice, which called for moral policing. This is where the governments came into action. China was among the first DATAQUEST | A CyberMedia Publication
visit www.dqindia.com
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Cover Story ones to adopt a censorship policy, which is said to date back as early as 300 AD. It received worldwide criticism for it. But now with other countries like the US talking about Internet Censorship Bill already, internet censorship seems to have become reality in every country. As of today, India has more than a 100 mn internet users. Hence India has the third largest number internet users after China and the US. After a while, there shall be very little difference between China, US, or India. Hence the debate would no longer be about what but how to censor the freedom to citizen in this spree. According to a recent media report, Reporters Without Borders produced a Press Freedom Index of 179 nations, where all the 3 counties in mention fell down the ladder—US came down to 47 from 20s, India was at 131 rank against 122 last year, and China was ranked at 174. A comparison between 3 countries will be only about execution, which would largely be a political decision. While it’s difficult to arrive at a conclusion, but we should deeply look into the real scenario of 3 major countries that are practicing or looking forward to adopting this control.
Targeting the Media
Media has been the most vulnerable prey of censorship. From The New York Times, BBC, to Indian Journals, everyone has bared it all, especially during wartime. We still remember those blank pages on the cover pages of The Indian Express. As rightly mentioned in the famous lines of Armed Islamic Group (GIA): ‘Those that live by the pen shall die by the sword’, hence not only in the past but also in the recent times, Iran, China, Korea, and many other countries have reported detention of the journalists. Things haven’t changed then, except that the number of pen-hold22 | February 29, 2012
Unlike China, where punishment is as harsh as an arrest and imprisonment, US claims to be critical about internet censorship, but does practice a soft control
ers has multiplied massively. The next category of target is the social media group like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, who have been in a constant fight with governments like in China.
China’s Controlling Methods
After The Great Wall of China, the extensive structure of 8,851.8 km, another great surprise from the Republic came as the Great Firewall (The Golden Shield Project) that started in 1998. Today it has shaped up as one of the most sophisticated control systems. It’s a robust control system that can scan and censor everything—internet sites, mobile text messages, calls, social networking services, etc. Rather than following the hackneyed process of blocking domain extensions and websites, China follows Google, ie, they identify and block as per the keywords. So, an utter of a non-permissible word during a telephonic conversation can disconnect the call. The Mainland has built an infrastructure that can pass through all networks; recognize multiple speech/languages in the conversation; screen the content for objectionable content, and disable them. Hence regulating what people communicate about visit www.dqindia.com
and stand-up comedians laugh at. The matter does not always end at a call, even today the civilians are detained for uploading the pictures, videos, etc, that are inappropriate as per the government.
A Unique Quagmire
China falls into a unique quagmire, where it being among the fastest and emerging economies, needs to spread internet usage among the people, but with a caution. The communist government in Mainland is indeed going beyond just censoring to controlling what its people read, gather, and share. And this is what they chose. Around 2009, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology at China tried to create an automated network called Green Dam. It’s a software that would sit in the public cafes, schools, and home PCs. Positioned as a content-filtering tool for kids using internet, was actually serving the government’s main motive of building a system to remotely access the content for all, and soon this would occupy the mobile phones as well. While the project was called off following a public debate, but the government is said to have sent a notification to all PC manufacturers to pre-install the software in their entire latest product line. Many media houses like The New York Times and BBC would report that their website had been blocked, and then surprisingly unblocked. The corporates failed to promote free speech in front of the government and those who did not accept were blocked like Facebook, Twitter, and many videos on YouTube. This is a bitter truth, and the fresh victim being Twitter, which changed its stance from ‘Tweets Must Still Flow’ to ‘If required by the laws’. It announced to follow the censorship rules as per the respective country. Twitter’s blockage in the territory might find
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its way after this announcement. Google, the search engine major, operated a separate domain as .CN for the country, but then it got into a tiff. According to reports, the search results are routed through Hong Kong. Akin to the technology companies, people are finding ways to surpass this firewall and spread their voice. In order to evade the censor obstacle, people have been using euphemisms and metaphors like a ‘Kuang Kuang’ animation series where anyone saying sunflower seeds vanishes. Another common practice is building selfowned Virtual Private Network (VPN). After all, it’s an army of a thousand against the population of a billion.
US: Critical but Softer
Unlike China, where punishment is as harsh as an arrest and imprisonment, US claims to be critical about internet censorship, but does practice a soft control. Much credit could be given to the federal nature of the government, where the head of the state like the president is more sensitive than harsh to the issues of a common man. The first amendment to the US constitution, which mentioned that ‘Congress shall not make any law abridging the Freedom of Speech or of the press’ had protected the internet users. With the onset of WikiLeaks deviations did come, since it has been posting a series of information against the US government. US, however, at present is engulfed in a different argument of copyright infringement, wherein the so-called rogue websites will be blocked, if found copying the content. At present, they have Safe Harbor under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that became a law in 1998 under Clinton’s regime. As per this law, spreading of any technology, device, or service DATAQUEST | A CyberMedia Publication
Determining India’s Stand
More content creation and sharing meant more strength to voice or an unrestrained strength to the voice, which called for moral policing. Hence this is where the governments came into action
that could be marked under copyright is illegal and punishable. An extension to this is what we are hearing about as Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The bill is calling it a safeguard of American intellectual property. While a clause in Section 230 of the US constitution protects the ISPs, this new Bill would reverse the entire structure forcing the ISPs to act upon and remove the URLs of the concerned websites. However US has been contemplating on using the prototype of China’s Green Dam already. It has installed a content-control software, which also called censorware or web-filtering software in public libraries. Unique in its approach, it even proposed a bill to establish an office for building a technology to counter and cross the censorware in other countries. In the internet censorship, right now US falls on the other extreme, where it plays in the global field. It condemns internet censorship in China, but plans to censor the entire internet world, even beyond their territory in the name of copyright. visit www.dqindia.com
India, too, seems to have joined the league of internet censorship like China, US, Burma, Pakistan, North Korea, Yemen, Iran, and many of them. The country has followed a comparatively softer approach. Being the largest democratic country, India has mostly heeded to the public opinion. The Ministry of Information and Technology talks about responsible controls like banning the comic strip of Savita Bhabhi or the nude images of models trying to claim the fame. Also, it favored ban on videos, images, and other content that depicted harassment, obscenity, bloodshed, and massacre for maintaining the public harmony. In 2003, it formed Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), under the IT Act 2000. However, at the same time, it was covering up many true stories like ban of Pakistan media sites during the Kargil War. In 2006, in order to block some 17 blogs hosted, ISPs blocked TypePad, WordPress, and GeoCities. Furthermore, the Home Ministry of India asked Yahoo! for details of a few account users, in denial of which it imposed a fine of `11 lakh. Recently, around 21 sites including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and YouTube were asked to screen and clean up the anti-religious and anti-social content by February 2012. Just as the information and telecom minister Kapil Sibal shared the government’s intent to screen the internet and the social networking sites, the users went berserk blasting their viewpoints everywhere. It is an open-ended debate as to where India would fall between the extremes of China and US. While there have been cases where bloggers were asked to pull down the content. However, from a larger perspective, the government has been very tolerant about the content and information on the internet. n February 29, 2012 | 23