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This bill has the best intentions. China ruthlessly caps freedom of speech among its citizens, and in light of the IOC recent decision to let China not give unfettered access to the internet to reporters, this bill seems especially necessary.
But, as many tech blogs and sites have pointed out, the bill is extremely flawed.
A much better approach to the issue would be to sanction some international organization the right to police the internet to keep national governments from infringing on its citizens rights.

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• HR 275 (110th)

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KEY ISSUE: The key section of the proposed law limits the ability of U.S. companies to place servers with customer data in “restricting” nations. These companies would not be able to release user information to host governments, with users able to sue the liable company in the case of a violation. There’s no restriction for the transfer of information turned over for “legitimate foreign law enforcement purposes.”

CONTEXT: The clamor around user information spiked after the imprisonment of Chinese journalist Shi Tao in 2005 for “revealing state secrets” with the help of Yahoo! Inc., who shared Tao’s email correspondence with government investigators tracking pro-democracy journalists within their borders.

The U.S. State Department cites the labeling of “internet-restricting” countries and penalizing of U.S. firms who violate HR 275 as a potential source of turmoil for U.S. business.

Internet companies criticizing the bill who nonetheless favor a completely free international market of information raise concerns over the role that internet companies would take under the legislation; the labeling of countries may, arguably, force apolitical business interests to make political judgments about host nations and whether they think their services will be used for censorship in them. A spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free speech group, explains that this phenomenon will not be isolated to the PRC, as “there is no country on earth where Internet and telecommunications companies do not face at least some pressure from governments to do things that would potentially infringe on users’ rights to free expression and privacy.”

As with any frontier space, there is the issue of who will ultimately govern and moderate the internet to ensure the most streamlined and safest market of information possible. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the self-anointed U.S. entity most closely performing this role, has come under criticism from the international community for not making domain-name decisions with other countries in mind in addition to neglecting the spam or consumer fraud abound in cyberspace.

China, the nation seemingly at the center of the public policy issues of Internet regulation, believes the issues “should be solved jointly by the sovereign states in the U.N. framework.” Skeptics of this proposal argue that the UN lacks the competency, capacity, and vested authority to address these issues at the moment.

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• HR 275 (110th)

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EU GOFA, modeled after the U.S. Global Online Freedom Act, was recently introduced by a cross-party coalition of Members of the European Parliament, including Dutch MEP Jules Maaten.

IPI Welcomes Proposal for an EU Global Online Freedom Act
09 September 2008
PRESS RELEASE

The International Press Institute (IPI), the global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists in over 120 countries, urges the European Commission to give due consideration to the draft EU Global Online Freedom Act (EU GOFA), recently introduced by a cross-party coalition of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), including Dutch MEP Jules Maaten. The EU GOFA would, if it were to become European Union law, help to promote the free flow of online information worldwide, and prevent European companies from assisting repressive governments to limit their citizens’ access to the Internet.

“IPI broadly welcomes the efforts of Mr. Maaten and other MEPs to address the issue of unjust Internet censorship, and I hope they will result in Commission initiatives for ensuring that authoritarian regimes do not censor freedom of expression,” said David Dadge, IPI Director.

According to information before IPI, the EU GOFA, a text modeled on the U.S. Global Online Freedom Act and sponsored by eight MEPs representing the four largest political groups of the European Parliament, was presented by Mr. Maaten on 17 July 2008. The text is seen as a response to the political censorship enforced by authoritarian regimes in countries such as China, Belarus and Ethiopia, and lays down guidelines to prevent European technology companies from becoming complicit in online censorship abroad, or from assisting authoritarian regimes to identify cyber dissidents, as was allegedly the case with the U.S. firm Yahoo!

Among other things, the EU GOFA calls for the establishment of an “Office of Global Internet Freedom” to protect and promote freedom of information abroad, for the compilation of an annual report designating those regimes that are the worst offenders in terms of restricting their citizens’ access to the Internet, and for the allocation of 20 million euros each year to the development and distribution of technologies aimed at helping Internet users in afflicted countries to circumvent censorship.

Currently, the EU GOFA has no legal status, as legislative proposals can only be introduced by the European Commission. As yet, the Commission has not indicated its willingness to introduce a legislative proposal based on the text drafted by the group of MEPs led by Mr. Maaten.

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• HR 275 (110th)

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Global Internet Freedom: Corporate Responsibility and the Rule of Law

Written Testimony of Arvind Ganesan
Director, Business and Human Rights Program, Human Rights Watch
Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Mr. Chairman:
...Human Rights Watch believes that the internet is a transformative force that can help open closed societies and provide the near-instantaneous flow of information to inform the public, mobilize for change, and ultimately hold institutions accountable. We have warned, however, that there is a real danger of a Virtual Curtain dividing the internet, much as the Iron Curtain did during the Cold War, because some governments fear the potential of the internet, want to control it and the companies that provide the services and products tied to it; and users fear the consequences of using it as a medium for openness and accountability.

Today, I would like to address three issues in relation to global internet freedom:

* The actions by some governments to restrict the flow of information and to punish individuals who exercise their right to free expression through this medium.

* The ongoing efforts by industry, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academics, and financial institutions to press for self-regulation to ensure that leading companies who provide internet technologies and services are not complicit in abuses or forced by governments to capitulate to their repressive demands.

* The prospects for government-led change and opportunities to ensure respect for human rights, particularly in regard to companies…

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/05/20/usint18894.htm

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• HR 275 (110th)

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“Cisco did a favor to the Chinese government several years ago by selling them the mirroring routers on which the Great Firewall is based, at a time when Chinese authorities could not easily have produced the systems on their own,” said James Fallows from “The Atlantic Monthly” during an interview with Network World Inc.

“The likely use of the routers was well understood—and it should be obvious why selling them to a government which intends to monitor its citizens is different from selling them to some company that wants to monitor its employees,” Fallows continued.

Cisco officials have testified during U.S. Senate and other hearings, insisting that it makes “off-the-shelf products” and does not specifically modify them to suit any country. Cisco will not sell products to any country that the U.S. federal government prohibits doing business with. Its only interest is to make the Internet accessible to anyone in the world, Cisco claims.

However, leaked internal documents from China suggest that Cisco was aware of China’s intentions and enthusiastically provided such technology to a repressive regime. The document even makes special mention of its role in silencing Falun Gong and other dissidents.

http://en.epochtimes.com/n2/business/chinese-counterfeiters-going-high-tech-4543.html

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Posted with permission from Rebecca MacKinnon.

Bottom line, this proposed legislation positions the U.S. government as arbiter and judge of how companies protect human rights. What kind of joke is that.

As if the U.S. didn’t have problems with a secret spying program. As if there weren’t serious concerns about the way in which parts of the U.S. government lean on telecoms companies to give them all kinds of data about U.S. citizens’ private communications, doing it so secretly that they’re not accountable to anybody. Don’t forget Americans have lawsuits in progress against companies for giving up their users’ rights a bit to readily for many Americans’ comfort. So why exactly should non-Americans be expected to want to use a U.S. Internet or telecoms service which is required to consult with the DOJ about their cases – yes, the same U.S. government department much maligned by many Americans, not to mention globally, for being a bit – shall we say -too open-minded about torture? Passage of such a law would seem to hand over one rather awesome marketing advantage to non-American competitors, in addition to being incredibly arrogant and hypocritical.

We need a global set of principles that assumes companies need to be on guard against abuses against their users’ rights by any government in any market. And I mean any.

http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2007/10/global-online-f.html

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• HR 275 (110th)

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From Jonathan Zittrain’s blog, licensed CC BY NC SA

Let’s focus on Section 201, which would prevent US companies from “locating” sensitive user information within Internet-Restricting Countries. Just what “locating” means here is not entirely clear: is a Chinese GMail subscriber’s email located on her own computer, in Mountain View, California, or on one of the many routers in between? Regardless, the goal here would be to make it more difficult for Internet-restricting governments to claim jurisdiction over, and gain access to, user data.

Unfortunately, as the Center for Democracy and Technology makes clear (pdf), Sec. 201 would almost certainly fail to achieve its objective, and might actually cause more harm than good. If US companies couldn’t place important servers within IRCs they would be forced to degrade some low-latency services (e.g. IM) and discontinue others (e.g. VoIP). This would discourage US investments in these countries and encourage less scrupulous foreign companies to take their place.

http://futureoftheinternet.org/global-online-freedom-act-governments-cant-protect-freedom-by-themselves)

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In my humble opinion we need to keep the government away from the internet. Regulating it in any way will give them a door to close off whatever else they might want to in the future.
Even if it is legitimately to protect our freedom now, as with other similar programs, they grow nefarious over time.

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