Sunday Age,
30 April 2023, excerpts:
Today
there are an estimated 5 billion people online. But those users are
not all surfing the same web. Sites accessible in, say, Darwin might
be blocked in Delhi.
Meanwhile,
internet freedom - access without surveillance or suppression - is
down for the 12th year in a row, according to US non-profit Freedom
House.
Splintering
happens at a content level, Sherman explains, as governments censor
the way the internet looks in their countries. But the technological
bones of the net are cracking too.
After
all, the internet is largely run under the sea, not in the Cloud -
data zooms along underwater cables snaking between continents. After
the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks revealed that US and British
intelligence agencies had been spying on traffic around the world via
these cables, Brazil announced it was building its own walled-off net
(yet to come online) and teamed up with Europe to start rerouting
more undersea cables around the US.
As
the great powers fight for technological dominance, nations are
kicking out foreign tech companies they take issue with - from the
US, Australia and other nations banning China's telecom giant Huawei
on network infrastructure builds, to Russia labelling Facebook's
parent company, Meta, a terrorist organisation.
Now
China's technology ministry has joined with a group of its telecoms,
including Huawei, to argue that the internet's underlying
architecture needs an update. And they have a radical plan: a new IP
they've been floating to the United Nations, which critics say will
allow for more government control.
How
do countries restrict internet freedom?…..
China
has been arresting people for online posts since the early years of
the "worldwide web". Today, there is no reliable count of
how many have served jail time. Dr Li Wenliang, who first raised the
alarm over COVID-19 in Wuhan in 2020, for example, was reprimanded
for his social media posts before he died of the virus…..
In
countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, people are on death row for
tweets and Facebook posts. And some regimes, including China, Russia
and Saudi Arabia, deploy armies of trolls and bots to intimidate and
harass critics online.
Of
course, during times of unrest, some governments simply shut down
their internet altogether. Think of Iran's blackout after the death
of a young woman in the custody of morality police in 2022. That
year, 35 countries pulled the plug a total of 187 times - a record
high. But shutdowns come at a cost: lost e-commerce, banking and tax
transactions, investor trust. Throttling, where a connection is
slowed to the point that it becomes nearly impossible to use, is more
subtle. Rights groups say it is deployed in Myanmar, Turkey and
Russia.
States
can also ask internet companies to remove data. Google lists such
requests in its transparency report: it has received 3.5 million
since 2011. National security is the most common reason, ahead of
copyright claims, defamation and privacy. In the past decade, Russia
requested by far the most removals from Google services, at more than
123,000, followed by Turkey at about 14,000 and then India, the US
and Brazil in that order, with fewer than 10,000 requests each.
Another
censorship ploy is DNS manipulation. DNS stands for domain name
system: it's the phonebook of the internet. People think of the net
in terms of website addresses, like amazon.com or smh.com.au, but
these domain names need to be turned into numbers for machines to
understand them. That's the job of the DNS. By manipulating the
servers that deliver it in a given territory, a user who searches for
YouTube, for example, could be redirected to a censored domestic
equivalent.
The
internet's DNS architecture is overseen by a Californian non-profit
with a very literal name: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers (ICANN). Russia wants to create its own DNS, claiming it
will need one if it's ever severed from the global internet - as
Ukraine asked ICANN to do when Russia invaded it in 2022. (ICANN
declined Ukraine's request, saying it was neither technically
feasible nor within the group's mission.)
But
for Russia, this is a key plank in its ambitions to create its own
"sovereign internet". To do that, it's looking at its ally
China.
What
is the gold standard for restricting the net?
When
the internet arrived in China just before the turn of the millennium,
the Communist Party was already quietly building the means of
controlling it. Under Project Golden Shield, China often turned to
Western companies for the technology it needed to funnel internet
traffic through chokepoints and spy on what flowed in.
Known
as China's Great Firewall, it's the world's most extensive internet
censorship tool. As the destabilising power of the internet has
become clear - including during the Arab Spring of the early 2010s -
the firewall has grown "higher".
China
now blocks Western social networks, except for a version of LinkedIn
stripped of its newsfeed. Google Search has been barred since 2010,
when the US company pulled out over a cyber attack and censorship
concerns.
"Censorship
covers a broad but ambiguous category of keywords and topics,"
says the Beijing internet user. "We don't know when and where
[we'll] hit the red line."
BACKGROUND
The 2023 Index of Economic Freedom lists Australia in 13th place and classifies it as "mostly free" - a drop of ten ranking positions since 2021 when it was classed amongst "the most free".
The Freedom on the Net 2022 report considered Australia ranks 9th out of 70 countries globally, tying with France and the United States, at the time classifying the country as "free".
Meanwhile, in Australia concerns still remain about our implied freedom of political communication under the Australian Constitution and the general public's right to know.
According
to Google
Transparency, in 2019 Australian federal or state
government officials or agencies (including police and the courts)
submitted 9 single item or bloc requests to Google Inc. requesting
removal or suppression of material indexed in Google Search or
found on Google sites such as YouTube and Blogger or
services such as Gmail.
In
2020 there were 13 single item or bloc requests to remove or suppress sent to Google from Australia, another 12 such requests in 2021 and
13 such requests in 2022.
Since
2011 Google Inc. has kept a file categorising reasons given by
government officials or agencies for submitting these requests.
In
the case of Australia from 2011 through to 2022 these categories
ranged from National Security, Government Criticism*, Privacy &
Security, Defamation, Hate Speech, Impersonation,
Bullying/Harassment, Religious Offence, Violence, Fraud, Adult
Content, Obscenity/Nudity, Suicide Promotion, Copyright, Trademark,
Regulated Goods and Services, Other and Reason Not Stated.
Google Inc. also records government requests for user information.**
In the years January 2014 to June 2022 Google lists receiving 32,103 individual government requests from Australia for user/s information relating to 38,952 accounts.
Note:
* Requests categorized as “Government criticism” are related to claims of criticism of government policy or politicians in their official capacity. Claims in this Google category are are not made by the members of the general public.
https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/7347744?hl=en
** A
variety of laws allow government agencies around the world to request
the disclosure of user information for civil, administrative,
criminal, and national security purposes. Google carefully reviews
each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws. If a request
asks for too much information, we try to narrow it, and in some cases
we object to producing any information at all.
https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/9713961#zippy=%2Chow-does-google-handle-government-requests-for-user-information
