Vinton
Cerf, one of the so-called ‘fathers of the internet’, senior VP and ‘Chief
Internet Evangelist’ at Google, has written
this article warning humanity at
large about what he sees as a concerted effort by governments around the world
to stop the net being free and open to all (he has also
posted on the same
subject on Google’s official blog). Now about this I am in two minds, not least
because it seems to me to be yet another attempt (and by someone representing a
very powerful private profit-making organization with its own axe to grind) to
portray governments (and more generally, all forms of authority) as
fundamentally hostile to human freedom and welfare.
When I
think of all the enormous benefits that the internet has brought to mankind in
just a little over two decades – not only all the new jobs and businesses it
has spawned or enabled to grow big but miracles like email and Wikipedia and
YouTube and blogging and online banking and ticketing etc etc – I agree almost
without reservation (were it not for the ‘copy-paste’ culture it has encouraged
among all sorts of people from schoolkids to post-doc scholars) that the
internet has been a Good Thing on a gigantic scale, and I would most certainly
like to see it keep growing and developing in myriad hitherto undreamed-of
ways. However, when I hear of fears that governments are secretly hatching dark
plans to hobble and enslave it, I cannot help wondering, for a variety of
reasons.
Firstly,
despite Mr. Cerf’s pretensions to historical wisdom (he is a techie, after all,
however rich and famous), the fact remains that governments have neither always
determinedly fought against progress nor generally succeeded – at least, not
for long. To take just two examples from a vast range of choices available to
any educated person, slavery could never have been abolished, nor measures of
public hygiene for the masses (including everything from networks of regularly
cleaned underground sewers to vaccination) would ever have been possible
without large scale government support and involvement anywhere on earth: and
no one in his right mind will argue that these were not major progressive steps
in human development. Mr. Cerf writes correctly in the last lines that ‘within
decades of Gutenberg’s creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the
right to print books’; what he omits to mention is that they failed despite their best attempts, and the printed word
managed to spread fast and wide enough to bring about events as momentous as
the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Governments are nowhere and never all
powerful; resolute people with clear aims and visions will find ways out of
their muzzles and dragnets. Scare mongering of this sort, therefore, might be
in the nature of dishonest hyperbole, and we should stop to wonder why it is
being done, whose interest is being served in reality.
Mr. Cerf
has also been careless enough to let slip his opinion that the
inter-governmental organization called the ITU is not wholly a Bad Thing, since
it has greatly helped the net to multiply quickly, smoothly and seamlessly
through global cooperation; only, his gripe is that governments alone have a
right to vote in it; ‘engineers, companies, and people that (sic) build and use
it have no vote’. He may have a point there (though it is also true that
engineers and companies are not traditionally asked to vote on the need to
build bridges and cities, either – that kind of decision making has always been
the preserve of governments, for the simple reason that nobody and nothing else
has been found to represent the ‘general public interest’ better than
governments do, all except the very worst of them anyway). So it may be okay to
demand that the deliberations of this meeting being held today at Dubai be made
public knowledge, and that governments do not take draconian measures without
informing and consulting their respective peoples, but it is absurd to say that
governments should not hold such meetings at all!
Then there
is this matter of there being so many governments which block the services of
Google and other companies either temporarily or permanently, and that being
portrayed as a very Bad Thing. Sign
the petition at once, don’t stop to think,
the article and the blogpost are telling us with shrill urgency, otherwise the
sky is going to fall on your head. It is at such times, when howling mobs
instigated by wily and ruthless manipulators with hidden agendas call for
bringing down all kinds of established standards, norms, conventions and
institutions (the trials of Socrates and Joan of Arc, and the effect of Mark
Antony’s speech at Julius Caesar’s funeral are telling cases in point) that
people who value reason, balance and fairness need to hold on most tightly to
their sanity and their own right of judgment, whether they are private
individuals or people in positions of public power. Yes, okay, many governments
do monitor, filter and even ban many kinds of content – so what? Doesn’t every
sensible parent do it with their child’s range of internet access (and don’t
give me the corny crap about adults being in general more mature and knowing
what is good for them – remember that most adults would rather watch dancing
girls or go to kitty parties than attend learned seminars, remember Auden’s
apocryphal ‘unknown citizen’, who ‘held the proper opinions for the time of
year/ when there was peace, he was for peace, when there was war, he went’;
remember the inimitable Humphrey Appleby in
Yes
Minister demonstrating with panache
how ‘public opinion’ can be manufactured at will by any sufficiently cunning
and powerful authority…)? Doesn’t Google do it itself (how many outside posts
criticizing their policies have they put up on their own blog)? I know a little
bit about my own country, and the kind of things our government has
occasionally banned or blocked – personal abuse of high level politicians, for
example, and vicious and completely irrational hate mongering websites
vilifying certain religious communities, designed to raise tempers and provoke
barbaric riots – have been found to be okay by most level-headed citizens;
occasions when governments went too far have been quickly remedied (as with the
recent Facebook incidents in Maharashtra and West Bengal), so where is the
terrible urgency to remove all powers of supervision and censorship from the
hands of governments?
As for the
worry that several regimes want a ban on anonymous posts, I happen to hold very
strong views in favour of it, from my own experience on the net, especially
with blogging. Somebody on my blog has
sought to justify it on the grounds that a lot of people like to post
anonymously – I hope I don’t have to belabour the point that that is one of the
stupidest arguments in favour of doing or not doing something. My experience is
that only ignorant and unreasonable people who want to abuse me out of pure
personal spite (and know that very well themselves, and are therefore scared to
expose themselves to the same kind of abuse!) as a rule feel the need to send
anonymous comments to my blog: no friend needs it, and no civilized critic
does, either. Blogger itself (a tool owned by Google) currently offers a
facility to block anonymous comments, and I have availed myself of it after
enduring for many years the ‘comments’ of vulgar cowards whose real problem was
a lack of education coupled with envy and having very little work to do. No man
who has a real opinion and courage of conviction, I shall maintain this to my
dying day, will be afraid to put his name to it – Luther wasn’t and Gandhi
wasn’t, I myself have never felt the need for it, and the ‘opinions’ of the
faceless crowd should never be given an overblown importance, otherwise there
is the end of competent government and decent social life. Besides, why doesn’t
a writer who insists on the importance of ‘transparency’ to the net fail to
notice the basic contradiction with the position that anonymous
posting/commenting is okay? You can’t have your cake and eat it too, Mr. Cerf!
Concerning
the fear that governments are planning to impose some kind of toll on content
providers and other net users for reaching out to audiences beyond borders, well,
what is so novel or wrong or traumatizing about the idea? Governments need
money to make vast outlays on providing many kinds of services to people which
the latter may imagine to be free – piped and chlorinated water to many homes
in India, for example – and so they try to impose tolls and taxes. People
speaking for vast corporates like Google are usually committed to the ideology
of the ‘free’ market when it suits them (where, ironically, all things should be priced for them to be produced
and distributed ‘efficiently’); when it doesn’t, they scream blue murder.
People pay computer hardware- and software manufacturers and internet service
providers for accessing the internet, so why shouldn’t they also pay a little
to governments which protect them (as with anti-cyber crime laws)? The fact
that most net users have gotten used to accessing virtually everything on the
net for free (except porn – for which millions pay gladly, a very telling
point) is not an argument to justify that this should go on forever, else the
net is doomed. Speaking for myself, I am quite willing to pay a toll for net
usage of the kind which I find useful, so long as it is small and fair, in the
sense that I willingly pay tolls for the use of the national highways, but find
it objectionable that someone driving a small hatchback is required to pay as
much as someone driving a top of the line BMW.
And
finally, look at the cartoon on top of the article. One banner says ‘Fear me, I am free’.Talk about
mindlessness having a field day. These are the same people who want to be free
of the fear of government. I don’t want to rub it in, but what kind of
ugly-minded pinhead can say that since everybody has a right to be free, someone needs to fear him so that he can
be free of fear? For the reader who finds that flying over his head, here’s
something simpler to think about: if you found an alligator or a tiger on the
road holding up a sign like that, wouldn’t you ring at once for someone to come
rushing and put the beast in a cage? Remember, then, that humans can be far
more annoying and dangerous than any dumb animal…
