Freedom of expression internet style

The original ethos behind the internet was to provide a vehicle for freedom of expression and to enable people to collaborate easily with each other for mutual benefit.

This idealism was a core value, and is still being played out in phenomena such as Napster, one of a raft of websites that enable music fans to swap files online.

But the sense of liberation that this provided was also a major factor in encouraging new e-entrepreneurs and individuals who had never run a business to make a leap of faith and exploit the possibilities opened up by the internet.

All this is slowly beginning to change, however. Take the story below, for example.

Long before the phrase "You've got mail" became associated with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan's Hollywood romance, it could have been adopted as the slogan for human rights group, Amnesty International.

Among Amnesty's many campaign weapons were the letters sent by members to prisoners of conscience around the world. The letters sometimes informed prisoners of ongoing campaigns to release them, but as much as anything were simply a means of comfort to remind the isolated that they weren't alone. Amnesty's name carried weight.

But the letters were also a reminder to governments around the world that someone was watching them. So when a site called www.amnesty-tunisia.org appeared praising the Tunisian government's human rights record, eyebrows were raised. Tunisia has an ongoing record of human rights violations, so why was Amnesty supporting it?

The simple answer is, it wasn't. The site had been set up by a PR agency, which, surprise, surprise, counted the Tunisian government as one of its main customers. Amnesty's official website, meanwhile, had been blocked by the authorities.

Such stories indicate that the powerful myth of freedom of speech offered by the internet warrants examination. This is particularly true now that governments, particularly those instituting authoritarian regimes, are waking up to the fact that the web could pose a threat, leading many to try to regulate and control access.

China, for one, in the words of pop psychologists, is a prime example of a country that is "conflicted". On the one hand, it is in the throes of an entrepreneurial revolution and is desperate for a free flow of money, goods and information.

On the other hand, the legacy of a socialist regime, which has traditionally exercised a tight stranglehold on information, means the government see the internet as a threat.

For example, a book of photographs documenting Bill Clinton's US presidency, dubbed The Clinton Years: The Photographs of Robert McNeely, was recently seized by its printers in China because it showed a picture of the president in the Oval Office with the Tibetan Dalai Lama.

The publisher immediately posted the controversial photo onto its web site, however, in a reminder to the Chinese people that it is possible to use the web as an anarchic vehicle for disseminating information.

But China doesn't need lessons in this. In September, the government announced a series of measures designed to try and bring the internet under control.

Internet service providers (ISPs) are now required to record data such as users' account numbers, internet addresses and the phone numbers used by customers dialling in to them. This information must be kept for 60 days and provided on demand to the police.

The authorities have also defined illegal content as anything that harms China's image, that creates social tensions or advocates "cults and superstition".

Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, explained: "Officials have a limited ability to monitor the vast sea of information online, so they've simply appointed the companies involved in ecommerce as proxy policemen."

But this may all sound somewhat familiar in the wake of the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act, which enables intelligence agencies to snoop on people's emails. And certainly it may make Chinese diplomats sitting across the table from their UK counterparts less inclined to listen to lectures on human rights and freedom of information.

Ilana Cravitz, a spokeswoman for the human rights group Article 19, recognises both the possibilities and the dangers of the web.

"The internet is very good for getting information around fast and mobilising numbers of people. But we are thinking about doing a survey of international regulations. Places like China regulate fairly heavily. A lot of places haven't caught up. There is the RIP Act in the UK, which may make surveillance legal, but we are waiting to see how that one pans out," she said.

"Our in-tray is filling up all the time as more organisations come online. But the internet means we can respond much more quickly and we can put our alerts instantaneously out to something like IFEX," she adds. The International Freedom of Expression Exchange regularly posts news on its IFEX.org website.

China is an obvious example of a country coming to terms with what the internet means as a vehicle for disseminating information.

But French organisation Reporters Sans Frontieres has identified a total of 45 countries that have restricted their citizens' access to the internet. Methods of doing this range from preventing access completely to forcing users to register with the government, to bringing ISPs under state control.

The list of such countries is depressingly familiar. It includes Burma, China, Iran, Iraq, Sierra Leone and Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the authorities explicitly identify the web as a corrupting cultural influence, "a harmful force for westernising people's minds". This means that users have to log on to servers in the government sponsored Science and Technology Centre if they want to access the internet. Elsewhere, people find ways around such blocks using GSM telephones and cellphones.

But as Ilana Cravitz points out: "If you look at the green net site, the gn.apc.org, it is a kind of alternative service provider that is linked to an international web service provider called alternative progressive communications, APC."

APC appears to be responding to demand for information that does not necessarily conform to the mainstream view.

Ultimately, however, it may be commercial factors that force governments to curtail regulation. The UK authorities may dream that the country will become a European ecommerce hub, but it is Germany that appears to be putting in place a legal framework to make this happen.

The German government is currently debating what, in effect, amounts to an anti-RIP bill, giving staff the right not to have their e-mails monitored. Technologically fuelled Ireland, on the other hand, is keen to adopt strong encryption technologies to encourage business and ensure that organisations' data remains confidential.

This means that, as we move more and more to a global economy, those countries continuing to push for regulation over the flow of information, may find themselves left off the ecommerce map.