In the past month, censorship of ordinary net users has reached disturbing new levels, disturbing even in these repressive times in which we live.

After riots surged onto the streets of Tibet, China decided to shut down access to YouTube inside the country in an effort to contain the news. In late February, Pakistan’s telecoms regulator ordered the same fate for the popular video-sharing site after a “blasphemous” speech critical of Islam was posted. Pakistan’s dismantling of YouTube was so thorough that none of us anywhere in the world could get on the site for a few hours afterwards. The clampdown on free speech and legitimate civilian reportage did not end there.

In the past week, the Cuban Government muzzled a well-read Cuban blogger, Yoani Sanchez, who was often critical in her posts of Fidel and Raul Castro and their socialist regime. Closer to the EU, it emerged this week that a judge in Civril, Turkey ordered that access to a photo and media-sharing service, Slide, should be closed to all Turkish citizens because some material deemed insulting to the country’s founder, Ataturk, was posted using the popular application.

Of course, it’s nothing new to find panicky regimes stifling free speech that challenges their narrow policies or contradicts their sanitised nightly news packages. Similarly, jittery backwater judges will always shut down access to threatening political and religious views. That’s just what they do.

Technology and the Web 2.0 revolution has changed very little the lives of individuals living under authoritarian governments. Yes, these technologies make possible the broadcasting of individual ideas to every corner of the globe. But there will always be another technological fix to plug that hole from which information leaks, and the next one and the next one and the next one. And, as Chinese officials well know, what they miss can always be taken care of with a testily worded warning to the companies that market the blogging software or operate the video-sharing site or the search engine.

If you are an activist in, say, Harare or Beijing or Civril, don’t look to the enlightened West for any meaningful help to protect and preserve your crusading efforts. The very companies that are investing vast sums to develop and promote these cheap and effective publishing tools have little time for your run-ins with local leaders and their baton-wielding enforcers.

Google again this week did more to torpedo free speech efforts in the developing world than any reactionary judge or panicky despot.

For the second consecutive year, the company’s board is facing a showdown with activist shareholders who would like to see the net giant institute a new policy calling for freedom of access to the internet regardless of a country’s local laws. The proposal, spelt out in Google’s latest proxy statement seems straightforward enough. The proponents want Google:

- to host all data that could identify an individual user only in a country where freedom of speech is protected.

- to comply only with legally binding requests for a user’s identity.

- to inform a user whenever it complies with legally binding “requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.”

- and not to participate in proactive censorship and to use its vast legal expenses “to resist demands for censorship”.

That this is not already Google policy already is enough of a setback. That Google appears determined to fight this well-meaning proposal is scandalous.

A year ago, Google fended off a similar anti-censorship proposal by arguing it would do more harm than good to set the terms of use in countries notorious for their hostility to free speech. In other words, a version of the Google search engine that edits out references to the Tiananmen Square massacre or a Tibet-free YouTube is better for the Chinese people, Google brass could just as well have said. Again, the same argument is expected this year at its annual meeting on May 8.

A judge in Civril, Turkey, will no doubt be delighted.

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Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

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