IP: From TIME: John Perry Barlow on censorship

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

This is copyright material from the 1/15/96 issue of TIME, reposted by
permission.


ESSAY


By John Perry Barlow


THINKING LOCALLY, ACTING GLOBALLY


An ex-cowboy and rock lyricist turned Internet activist takes on the
censors of cyberspace


Two weeks ago, a prosecutor in Munich managed, almost casually, to strike a
global blow against freedom of expression. Though he is a person of such
obscurity that most of the accounts I've read of this incident didn't even
mention his name, he has been able to constrict the information flow for
some 4 million people in 140 countries.


He did this merely by telling CompuServe, the world's second largest
online-service provider, that it was breaking Bavarian law by giving
Germans access to Usenet discussion groups believed to include explicit
sexuality. A strangely terrified CompuServe responded by removing any
newsgroups whose title contained the word sex, gay or erotic, thus blocking
access to all subscribers, not just those in Germany. Given the centralized
nature of its operations-and the decentralized nature of Usenet-this was,
according to CompuServe, the only way it could comply.


Thus were CompuServe subscribers prevented from further discourse on
whatever they talk about in alt.sex.bestiality.hamster.duct-tape (which may
exceed even my high squeamishness threshold). At the same time, however,
they were also barred from alt.religion.sexuality (a pretty chaste topic),
clari.news.sex (which redistributes wire-service stories) and
alt.sex.marsha-clark (the mind reels =8A).


Once again, the jackboots of the Industrial Era can be heard stomping
cluelessly around the Infobahn. In fact, the Germans did almost nothing to
stanch the flow of sexual materials. The newsgroups that CompuServe removed
are still active on millions of computers worldwide. CompuServe subscribers
in Bavaria or anywhere else can simply switch to a less timid online
service and re-enter the discussion. As Internet pioneer John Gilmore once
said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."


Such assaults are most likely to injure the large service providers, sober
institutions more culturally attuned to their governmental attackers than
the info-guerrillas of cyberspace. CompuServe, for its cowardice in folding
without a fight, probably deserves the calumny heaped on it by angry users.
The company says it hopes to reopen access to all but its German
subscribers as soon as it can figure out how.


But the issue at stake here is larger than whether the good people of
Munich can prevent others half a world away from looking at pictures of
sexually misused hamsters. These apparently trivial struggles may in fact
be the opening fissures of a historical discontinuity.


The real issue is control. The Internet is too widespread to be easily
dominated by any single government. By creating a seamless global-economic
zone, borderless and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the
very idea of a nation-state. No wonder nation-states are rushing to get
their levers of control into cyberspace while less than 1% of the world's
population is online.


What the Net offers is the promise of a new social space, global and
antisovereign, within which anybody, anywhere can express to the rest of
humanity whatever he or she believes without fear. There is in these new
media a foreshadowing of the intellectual and economic liberty that might
undo all the authoritarian powers on earth.


That's why Germany, the People's Republic of China and the U.S. are girding
to fight the Net, using the popular distaste for prurience as their longest
lever. After all, who is willing to defend depictions of sexual intercourse
with children and animals? Moving through the U.S. Congress right now is a
telecommunications-reform bill that would impose fines of as much as
$100,000 for "indecency" in cyberspace. Indecent (as opposed to obscene)
material is clearly protected in print by the First Amendment, and a large
percentage of the printed material currently available to Americans,
whether it be James Joyce's Ulysses or much of what's in Cosmopolitan
magazine, could be called indecent. As would my saying, right here, right
now, that this bill is full of shit.


Somehow Americans lost such protections in broadcast media, where coarse
language is strictly regulated. The bill would hold expression on the Net
to the same standards of purity, using far harsher criminal
sanctions-including jail terms-to enforce them. Moreover, it would attempt
to impose those standards on every human who communicates electronically,
whether in Memphis or Mongolia. Sounds crazy, but it's true.


If the U.S. succeeds in censoring the Net, it will be in a position to
achieve far more than smut reduction. Any system of control that can stop
us from writing dirty words online is a system that can control our
collective conversation in other, more important ways. If the nation-states
perfect such methods, they may own enough of the mind of mankind to
perpetuate themselves far beyond their usefulness.


If that sounds overstated to you, consider the millions of people one
prosecutor in Germany was able to mute with little more than an implied
threat.



--


John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist, cofounded the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, which defends civil rights in cyberspace.
He lives in Wyoming and New York and at barlow () eff org.


Copyright 1996 Time Inc.


Philip Elmer-DeWitt                                             ped () well com
TIME Magazine                                                  =
 philiped () aol com