“Internet Purification”

This post is inspired by the vow made by Chinese Communist Party chief Hu Jintao to “purify” the Internet. For more details, you can view the original news story from Reuters here http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/01/24/china.internet.hu.reut/index.html. This outlandish claim by Jintao stumbles onto another very important issue regarding technology and this issue is the feasibility and legality of Internet “purification,” or in other words, censorship. Is it even technically possible for a government to censor material on the Internet? Won’t the information that was censored keep reappearing in different places? How could it be possible for anybody to successfully track information to all the vast corners and far reaches of the Web? Besides, even if it were possible, it would open up Pandora’s box. There is no regulatory committee that can oversee this process. The Internet would become entangled in a web of lawsuits and quarrels, which would eventually cause the demise of the Internet. Certain information is not always going to be favorable to everybody and if the entity that is offended can bring about its removal, then suffice it to say that there will not be very much information out there on the Internet.

To better put this into context, I am going to refer to a case study from the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Diplomacy entitled “Globalization: France, Nazis, and the Internet.” Unfortunately, copyright laws prevent me from posting the original article up online but another article from this website talks about basically the same ideas http://www.probe.org/current-issues/current-issues/globalization-and-the-internet.html. The Georgetown article basically describes the motives of the French government and its attempts to force Yahoo! to block the sale of Nazi propaganda to French users even from Yahoo!’s American website address. The main thing to note about this article is that it discusses the same thing that Jintao is proposing: censoring information on the Internet for whatever reason. Yahoo! did end up removing the listings, but its representatives said it was not because France demanded it, but because it was the right thing to do. If mass censorship was implemented on the Internet how could any information out there survive?