(0)

Due to its decentralized nature, the Internet is not "controlled" by a single agency, state or company. Contrary to popular belief, the network is not an entirely free "jungle" : at all levels, many organizations are or can exercise control or censorship on circulating information.

At the Global Level

Globally, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers aka ICANN, exercises control over the most basic structures of the World Wide Web. As a not-for-profit organization, it has a special status, and is subject to California law. It is composed of a number of committees tasked to manage structural problems, and manages domain names and Internet Protocols. The governance of this strategic organization is subject to much debate. The US’ over-representation in most committees is perhaps among the most controversial points. Europe and China , in particular, have been pressing for a more open management of IANA, seen as the root of the internet, as it controls all .com domains. The ICANN exercises tremendous power on the net, since the organization may suspend entire domain names as it wishes and as it has, like in Iraq (.iq) or Afghanistan.

For the smooth functioning of the network, a separate organization is responsible for setting the technical standards for the most commonly used technologies, such as HTML. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is jointly managed by American, European and Japanese experts.

At the national level

Although decentralized, the network remains nevertheless dependent on physical infrastructure: in the absence of those large cables the traffic is significantly reduced. The problem is that a significant number of countries still rely only on a couple, sometimes even a single underground wire. As such, the access of entire populations is often entirely depend on the ‘good will’ of (all too often, Western) service providers located in neighboring countries, as it is the case in most African countries.

Crucially, governments have the technical capacity to block or censor some or everything on the web. During the protests leading to the fall of Mubarak, the government successfully cut all access to the web, simply by pressuring national service providers. Blocking two protocols controlling the exchange of vital information was enough to cut the country from the rest of the web within hours.

Without necessarily involving such extreme practices, many countries do exert a significant level of control over the net. Content which is deemed as breaching national law remain blocked in authoritarian countries and liberal democracies alike. In France for instance, a provision designed to control online gambling, enables the government to filter those websites which have are not approved. In Australia, a vast project of online censorship has been delayed as a consequence of difficulties, of both technical and legal nature. Whilst, those filtering systems are hardly infallible, that's not the point here.

Each year, Reporters sans frontieres, a NGO which campaigns for the right to freedom of speech and information, publishes a report on the state of censorship around the world. In their report, ten countries, ranked at the bottom of the list for their draconian censoring, have been branded as ‘enemies of the internet’. Among others, China, Burma, and Iran are particularly criticized for spying on internet users. Russia, Venezuela or France, according to RSF are ‘countries under surveillance’ because of their restrictive legislation which often enables governments to filter access to certain website and to have access to the ISPs’ lists of subscribers and to all their records.

At the individual level

Within a single country, many actors can exercise control over the way in which users access the web. In theory, ISPs hold substantial power: they can either slow down or block certain types of traffic, such as P2P downloading. But it is argued that internet neutrality, the informal internet code of conduct, usually inhibits ISPs from discriminating content circulating on the network, regardless of the user or the type of data, which means that all data travels at the same pace.

In practice however, ISPs complaining of bottleneck congestions, do tend to infringe on that rule, and give priority to certain ‘packs’ over others. In some countries, as in the US or in Canada, ISPs go as far as restricting subscribers’ internet speeds or the amount of data available for download.

Censorship | Internet