Like many US soft-power initiatives, the programme was imperfect, morally complex and at times at odds with the policies of other governments. Yet it is one foundation of what the internet is: a global commons. Today’s online world is dominated by large tech platforms and awash with illegal content and misinformation. But it is still a structure in which facts, ideas and information accessible from London are largely accessible from Delhi, Johannesburg and São Paulo as well.
That could change rapidly. On the one hand is the matter of US funding, now cut or apparently redirected towards a Trumpian, politicised effort to undermine global attempts to regulate US big-tech platforms.
On the other is the mounting export of censorship technologies, which are constantly improving and increasingly marketed overseas. These include devices sold by companies in China that give their customers – governments in Pakistan, Myanmar and Ethiopia among others – extremely fine-tuned control over what comes in and out of a country. It is believed that similar technologies are the foundation of Iran’s current shutdown.
This article unfortunately fails to mention the US has provided a significant portion of the apparatus to China.
Even while warning about national security and human rights abuse, the U.S. government across five Republican and Democratic administrations has repeatedly allowed and even actively helped American firms to sell technology to Chinese police, government agencies and surveillance companies, an Associated Press investigation has found.
And time after time, despite bipartisan attempts, Congress has turned a blind eye to loopholes that allow China to work around its own rules, such as cloud services, third-party resellers, and holes in sanctions passed after the Tiananmen massacre.