Free Internet – has it ever existed?

The fact that government suddenly revealed its plans to sign the controversial agreement ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) caused a real storm on the Internet; also many governmental websites became a target for the group of Anonymous.

Only a few weeks ago nobody has heard about this document. In Poland the first information was given by the “Dziennik Internautów” in 2009 – it was about a mysterious document being secretly prepared. I wrote about it on “Kod Władzy” blog when eight countries signed this document often ignoring the democratic procedures.

In spite of publicity around the Anonymous, their attacks are more spectacular than dangerous – they just try to attract attention to this controversial act. The declarations of publishing the politicians’ secret documents seem to be more serious. However, we can assume that the Anonymous are totally serious in their ideas. It is mainly because they have already proved their efficacy in hacking into servers of different companies and stealing data from them. This was the case of PayPal, VISA, Mastercard and Stratfor where the hackers stole e-mail addresses and credit cards numbers.

It is possible that they are not lying.

Although the controversies about this agreement caused uproar in Poland, it is not the first step towards limiting the “freedom on the Internet”. As a matter of fact, the Web has been limited since a long time ago.

The limits can concern many spheres and they also depend on cultural or religious background, on the political system or history. For example, the broadly discussed Chinese Internet; according to the OpenNet Initiative’s reports, China does not comply with the criteria in three main areas: political, social and security area.

Censorship in North Korea is not surprising, but what about imposing limits by Seoul? As we can see, also the South Korea has put some appropriate restrictions by preventing people to enter the websites which praise their southern neighbor.

The situation in the Middle East is also different. Apart from the political reasons that make entering on the websites of the Muslim Brotherhood impossible, the religious reasons are also important. They are visible in e.g. blocking the porn websites, but it is not the end of such actions. The government of Saudi Arabia makes efforts in order to prevent the internauts to come across the websites informing how to become a Christian.

Free Europe?

Maybe the examples of some Asian authoritarian countries are not astonishing, but when we speak about the European Union, which is generally considered as liberal, such limits can be a surprise for the reader. The limits concern the content appearing under a general category which is “the speech of hatred” persecuting religious and ethnical minorities. For example in France and Germany the government fights against websites promoting Nazism.

Apart from the mentioned content, the question of copyrights is also significant – it was a reason for the big debate on ACTA. We should know that this subject has been broadly discussed by European countries since a long time ago; the new agreement is only an international aspect of this discussion. Let us take France as an example. According to the latest edition of the “Internet Enemies” report (published since 2006 and edited by the organization “Reporters without borders”) this country was found in the category “Under Surveillance” after when the government introduced a new law aiming to “civilize the Internet”.

Till now, as the Reporters without borders claim, France is the only country which violates freedom on the Internet in such way that it needs to be put in their report.

Let’s return to the copyrights. The main reason why governments are trying to create new regulations is the fact that internauts can freely copy data from the Internet. People who rule the countries will be certainly interested in some publications such as the Oxford Internet Institute’s report from 2011 which shows that technological progress won’t make the freedom of speech bigger – it will rather enable the government and the police to easily control the Web. In April 2011, “The Telegraph” informed that the EU wanted to introduce

a European “firewall” which won’t be designed to protect the Internet from the attacks from outside but in order to enable blocking the servers located outside the EU. This idea wasn’t put into practice, but who knows when the politics will think about it again.

Other regulations concerning copyrights caused a real storm in the EU – the “Pirates Movement” has come into being as a result of growing popularity of the Pirates Party in Sweden. They want to abolish the existing limits concerning copyrights; they are also against the general European division into right and left.

What about Poland?

In spite of the wave of protests against ACTA, the document itself and comments about it are worth seeing. According to Tymoteusz Barański from the Republican Foundation, the Polish law gives more powers than ACTA. This information is not surprising considering the fact that the European Union’s report from 2011 showed that the Polish people are the most invigilated society in EU.

On the other hand, one of the most controversial things about ACTA is the fact that it contains many basic and general concepts. What is more, ACTA seems to be a document written from the perspective of a particular group of people. As Barański says: “ACTA is mainly focused on protecting those who have the intellectual property rights and it doesn’t determine the rules of using the protected content by every-day users.

As we can see, we cannot say that the freedom on the Internet has always existed. However, many newly introduced laws and regulations will enlarge the number of limits. Even when such commentators as Anthony Wile from the “Daily Bell” say that it is the beginning of war for freedom on the Internet, we need to remember that its freedom has been finished a long time ago.