On Internet Freedom by Ammori Marvin

Author:Ammori, Marvin [Ammori, Marvin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Elkat Books
Published: 2013-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

★★★

Several observers have written about the lawyers who craft the terms of service—generally not at Amazon and Paypal but at Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Indeed, several of these lawyers have received glowing profiles in the nation’s most prominent newspapers emphasizing their commitment to freedom of speech or their position as de facto judges determining which speech should be taken down and which should stay up. The New York Times profiled Nicole Wong, known at Google by the George W. Bush–inspired nickname “the decider.” When governments and individuals around the world asked YouTube to take down specific videos, she made the ultimate decisions. The profile’s author, a law professor named Jeffrey Rosen, wrote that Wong and her team “arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.”

Wong now works at Twitter, helping to implement pro-speech product design. She joined another former Googler, Alex McGillivray, now general counsel of Twitter, whom the Times described as “Twitter’s free speech defender.” The Times profile of Facebook’s decider, twenty-six-year-old Dave Willner, describes his decision to keep up the WikiLeaks fan page but take down the fan pages of those coordinating cyberattacks against Paypal.

While these articles often describe these lawyers as “today’s judges,” these lawyers have always struck me more as today’s Alexander Bickels. Just as the great First Amendment lawyers of the 1970s worked for and at the New York Times and Washington Post, many of today’s leading thinkers on cutting-edge free-speech issues work for and at Google and Twitter—not to mention Tumblr, WordPress.com, Reddit, and others. While these companies, like the newspapers, have their flaws, they have incentives to protect freedom of speech under many circumstances. Twitter’s unofficial tagline is “The tweets must flow.” Google often hires lawyers with a background in free speech. Indeed, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a pro-bono organization founded in Washington in 1970 to protect journalists, has seen increasing involvement from tech companies like Google that act as journalists’ platforms—not their editors and publishers.

The lawyers making the day-to-day decisions—drafting terms of use, enforcing them in light of requests from around the world—don’t have easy jobs. Governments can request that a specific video be removed—or threaten to block an entire site and impose an even bigger burden on the company and on the ability of citizens to access speech tools. Even Twitter, which has a pro-speech orientation, has implemented a censorship policy that allows countries to request that particular illegal tweets be removed. This policy, while unfortunately required in a world with governments, generally received praise from civil rights groups for how well it balanced the difficult questions of complying with various national laws, some in authoritarian countries, and ensuring freedom of speech.

Where civil libertarians have been most critical is where the terms of service appear even more restrictive than necessary to comply with local law. Some countries facilitate their control of Internet speech within their borders by requiring that Internet users use their real names. These countries include China and, up until recently, South Korea.

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