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Recent actions by Google and Twitter show a willingness on their part to engage in some give-and-take as they push their efforts at Internet and social media dominance -- and find some governments pushing back. UPI/Mohammad Kheirkhah 

Recent actions by Google and Twitter show a willingness on their part to engage in some give-and-take as they push their efforts at Internet and social media dominance -- and find some governments pushing back.

The battle lines are forming between companies that want a free and open Internet as the pathway to business success and governments unhappy with freedom and openness in the hands of citizens.

In that battle, Google and Twitter have shown themselves willing to consider the occasional strategic retreat.

First, Twitter announced the ability to censor selected tweets within a country, as opposed to simply cutting off service entirely. Previously Twitter said it could only consider an "all or nothing" strategy.

Twitter tried to meet criticism by saying it would ensure more people would see tweets, not fewer.

The ability to mask or censor certain messages would mean only a small percentage of users would lose access, the company said.

"When we receive [a takedown notice]," Twitter Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo said, "we want to leave the content up for as many people as possible while adhering to the local law."

Twitter's move was followed by an announcement by Google that its blogger sites can be blocked on a "per country" basis and it could -- and would -- block access to particular blogs in individual countries following a legal removal request from the government.

The decision, Google said, meant it would not have to resort to restricting worldwide access to a blog.

"If you visit a blog that does not correspond to your current location as determined by your IP address, the blogspot servers will redirect you to the domain associated with your country," Google said in a statement about the changes.

The decisions by Twitter and Google have been roundly criticized by free speech advocates and those favoring an open, uncensored Internet.

On the other side are governments that witnessed the impact the Internet and social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook had on the Arab Spring uprisings last year despite government attempts to control or shut down lines of communications.

Those protesters were quick to realize the vital resource offered by the Internet and mobile communications.

As one anonymous activist in Egypt tweeted, "we use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world."

Different regimes have attempted various strategies to stay in control of communications, including attempting to shut down the Internet entirely within their borders.

In China, which has a long history of censoring the Internet, new rules were announced that users of the country's popular microblogs would have to provide authorities with their true identities before being allowed to post.

So the dilemma for Twitter, Google and other social media entities remains a serious one: Do they allow a country's government to dictate the terms operations, or do they, under the principle of a free and open Internet, risk losing access to that country -- and its millions of potential users -- completely?

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SciTechTalk: Internet 'give and take'?

With so much attention focused on in highly restrictive countries such as China, Iran and Syria, the discussion of global Internet freedom often has tended to exclude the large class of more moderate nations with rapidly growing online populations with only a rudimentary set of laws and policies for the Web.

To the extent that the issue has received coverage in the mainstream press, the banner headlines have generally been reserved for the higher-profile flare-ups, recently seen in various Internet crackdowns amid the Arab spring uprisings or Google's 2010 standoff with China over online censorship.

But for Bob Boorstin, Google's director of corporate and policy communications, the greater uncertainty, both for U.S. businesses looking to new markets overseas and global Internet users, is found in the countries that have neither made forceful affirmations of online freedom nor implemented rigid, state-sanctioned censorship frameworks.

"The countries that I'm most concerned with in the next couple of years and that I think are most worth looking at are those in the middle -- the Brazils and the Indias and Argentinas and the Chiles and the North African countries and Southeast Asian [countries], like Indonesia, the Philippines. And the question I want to put on the table is which way are they going to go?" Boorstin said here at an event hosted by the Media Access Project, a nonprofit public-interest law firm and advocacy group. "That's the question that I'm focused on at the moment."

Clinton Shines Light on Internet Freedom

Shortly after Google went public with the revelations that it had been targeted by a series of cyber attacks emanating from China and announced that it would no longer comply with that country's Internet censorship rules, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made Internet freedom the subject of a major policy speech in January 2010, an issue she has revisited in subsequent remarks.

Secretary of State ClintonClinton cast the issue in terms of human rights and freedom of expression, and signaled that Internet freedom would become an integral part of U.S. foreign policy and diplomatic strategy.

Ben Scott, policy adviser for innovation at Clinton's office, called that speech a "sea change" that served to elevate Internet issues to a first-tier item on the global policy agenda.

"Virtually everyone has woken up to the fact that the Internet matters to foreign policy," Scott said on Tuesday. "This is an issue that no one can ignore anymore."

But that broad acceptance that the Internet matters is not to be mistaken for anything close to consensus on the subject, Scott said.

He acknowledged that there is a rudimentary understanding that "technology is a catalyst for economic growth" throughout the international community, but added that he regularly meets with senior government, academic and business leaders around the world who do not believe that the Internet represents a net good, a starting point that is bound to prescribe a policy framework very different from that found in the United States and other countries where the Web is a generally open platform for expression.

"I think we have an erroneous tendency to project our own assumptions and our own familiarities in this debate on other capital cities. And we forget the fact that in most of these middle countries it's really only in the last two years -- thanks to the smartphone -- that significant percentages of their populations are online," Scott said. "These are new questions in a lot of these countries."

In India, for instance, the percentage of residents using the Internet still numbers in the single digits, according to Scott. Yet that country, with the world's second largest population and a thriving tech economy in cities such as Mumbai and Bangalore, represents a hive of opportunities for U.S. tech firms. At the same time, it has exhibited some worrisome signs of heavy-handed oversight that could mute the enthusiasm with which businesses eye the market.

Google and Facebook Comply

Just this week, word surfaced that Google and Facebook had each taken down certain content on their domains in India to comply with a court ruling that upheld a lawsuit against a larger group of Internet companies seeking mechanisms to block sensitive religious material.

"That's the kind of thing that we're going to run up against all the time. The question is will they come out in the defense of an open Internet," Boorstin said of his company's situation in India.

He explained that he is hopeful that countries still developing the building blocks of their Internet policy will ultimately land on the side of openness. Even if they are not compelled by a philosophical allegiance to free expression, the pragmatic understanding that a cross-border flow of communication through social media and cloud computing technologies will be an essential piece of the 21st century economy should be motivation enough to loosen their Internet policies.

"They will recognize that without that free flow of information they're going to stifle if not strangle their growth," he said.

Kenneth Corbin is a Washington, D.C.-based writer who covers government and regulatory issues for CIO.com.

Read more about government in CIO's Government Drilldown.

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Internet Freedom: Next Battlefields

Maybe the GOP (or more specifically, certain members of the party) returned to the '50s in just one day, but the rest of us haven't. Beyond the obvious social and cultural shifts of the last 60 years, there is one major factor: the Internet.

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Talking Points Memo's Evan McNorris-Santoro looked at the confluence of events on Thursday and pronounced it "the day Washington fell into a time-warp," turning back the discussion of women's rights 60 years. Others, such as the editors of The New Republic, think we are on the brink of a "culture war" over women's rights. They're reacting to the last few weeks of controversy: most recently women were kept out of a hearing on Obama's new contraception ruling so that men could discuss the "religious freedoms" at stake without having to be bothered by that silly context of female health concerns, and one 71-year-old Rick Santorum backer made a horrible grandpa joke about birth control, for which he has apologized. It goes back further -- we're also talking about the recent public battle between Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Planned Parenthood, in which Susan G. Komen initially withdrew funding to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings (for "legal reasons" that seemed very clear to many were actually anti-abortion ones) but changed their tune when the backlash appeared detrimental to their organization.

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All three episodes have elements that would be familiar in the 1950s, but the way we engage in media -- and the widespread, rapid exchange of information via social media and other tools -- has changed things drastically between then and now. In the 1950s, an Internet campaign would not have existed to essentially force Susan G. Komen to backtrack on its stance about Planned Parenthood. Outrage over what looked like former Komen SVP Karen Handel's heavy-handed orchestration of the decision to pull funding from Planned Parenthood due to her staunch anti-abortion ideology would likely not have resulted in Handel's resignation, a resignation quickly proliferated online. In the 1950s, should Fleiss's Bayer Aspirin joke have circulated widely enough to have offended enough people to inspire action against it, women and men would not have been able to call him out on it so rapidly, nor to make him accountable for it. He never would have apologized on his own blog. (Nor, apparently, taken down that blog.)

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Even if some Republicans desperately would like to return to another era (and some, arguably, haven't changed much in their attitudes since that time), the way in which we're having these discussions -- on blogs, on Twitter, on our Facebook pages, and in an overwhelmingly participatory, everyone-has-a-voice fashion -- has changed the political and social landscape forever. As much as we bemoan the state of things today (and there's no denying that certain attitudes are not only old-fashioned but downright archaic and dangerous), we have to acknowledge that we're in an unprecedented time for change. One thing the Internet is very, very good at is existing as a place where the self-righteous, the inauthentic, or the blatantly ridiculous can be brought to a kind of public justice -- shamed, held accountable, debated, made to explain. The Internet catalyzes backlash. And we keep seeing the Internet get results.

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The recent examples of such Internet wins, righting the tasteless jokes and PR injustices; taking one person or group to task and punishing them for their mistake, all seem to involve short skirmishes rather than full-out wars, though. Maybe it's the attention span of the Internet, or the 24-hour news cycle -- maybe this war will actually happen in short, bitty bursts online as opposed to the drawn-out physical campaigns of old. Or maybe this isn't a war at all. Maybe we're just living in a particularly fraught time because we sit on the precipice of great change. 

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Either way, it seems as though she who uses the Internet best will have a distinct and unprecedented advantage in the ongoing battle. And the more retrograde conservatives get, the stronger the foundation, mobilization, and mass of any counter-argument. Practically speaking, as Evan McMorris-Santoro writes in TPM, "This could be a big problem for the GOP when the calendar reaches November."

Thank the 21st century for that.

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Never Fight a Culture War on the Internet

Feature Articles | More Science See Inside

Governments and corporations have more control over the Internet than ever. Now digital activists want to build an alternative network that can never be blocked, filtered or shut down

By Julian Dibbell  | February 16, 2012 |

Image: Photograph by Dan Saelinger

In Brief The Internet was designed to be a decentralized system: every node should connect to many others. This design helped to make the system resistant to censorship or outside attack. Yet in practice, most individual users exist at the edges of the network, connected to others only through their Internet service provider (ISP). Block this link, and Internet access disappears. An alternative option is beginning to emerge in the form of wireless mesh networks, simple systems that connect end users to one another and automatically route around blocks and censors. Yet any mesh network needs to hit a critical mass of users before it functions well; developers must convince potential users to trade off ease of use for added freedom and privacy.

Just after midnight on January 28, 2011, the government of Egypt, rocked by three straight days of massive antiregime protests organized in part through Facebook and other online social networks, did something unprecedented in the history of 21st-century telecommunications: it turned off the Internet. Exactly how it did this remains unclear, but the evidence suggests that five well-placed phone calls—one to each of the country’s biggest Internet service providers (ISPs)—may have been all it took. At 12:12 a.m. Cairo time, network routing records show, the leading ISP, Telecom Egypt, began shutting down its customers’ connections to the rest of the Internet, and in the course of the next 13 minutes, four other providers followed suit. By 12:40 a.m. the operation was complete. An estimated 93 percent of the Egyptian Internet was now unreachable. When the sun rose the next morning, the protesters made their way to Tahrir Square in almost total digital darkness.

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Internet Freedom Fighters Build a Shadow Web (preview)

SCHNEIDER, IN--(Marketwire -02/17/12)- DRH Internet Inc., makers of the GreenArrow Suite of Email Delivery software, today announced that John Bollinger has joined the company as Director of Deliverability and ISP Relations. In this role, John will continue and expand upon GreenArrow's Deliverability Consulting services, further developing and preaching best practices with DRH clients while providing expert advice of how to best reach the Inbox.

David Harris, president of DRH Internet, said, "With the GreenArrow suite, DRH provides a complete solution to marketers and ISPs. We are one of the few companies that provide both self-hosted email delivery software and deliverability consulting services. It's always been important to us to be able to help our clients not just send their email, but to deliver it to the Inbox. We're delighted to have John on board."

John brings a wealth of knowledge in email deliverability best practices, CAN-SPAM and CASL compliance and ISP relations. In his 7 years of email deliverability experience, John brings perspectives from both the Sender and Email Service Provider sides. Prior to joining DRH, John provided deliverability consulting to Fortune 500 companies at BlueHornet Networks, an Email Service Provider. Prior to that, he was the Director of Email Delivery Services for Hot Topic Media, a leading provider of self-help and business advice products. While there he created a business unit that changed email from an afterthought to one with dramatically improved deliverability through best practices and processes that do this day produce continuous improvement. He continues to be involved in several industry groups including MAAWG (Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group), EEC (Email Experience Council) and ESPC (Email Sender and Provider Coalition).

"I am very excited about joining a growing company like DRH that continues to be on the cutting edge of email delivery products and services. I am confident that I will contribute to a new level of Email Deliverability Services, expanding on the excellent advice already given to many GreenArrow clients."

About DRH Internet
DRH Internet is the provider of the GreenArrow suite of email delivery software, monitoring, and consulting designed to maximize the success of high volume email sending. GreenArrow is a robust and complete email delivery solution that is affordable, easy to use, and backed by personalized and expert customer support. Visit http://www.drh.net or call 1-866-374-4678 for more information.

Excerpt from:
DRH Internet Announces Director of Deliverability and ISP Relations