First they came for the digital pirates, and I did not speak out — because I was not a digital pirate.
Under the auspices of “copyright protection,” 40 countries met last week in South Korea to continue writing the obituary of digital freedom. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, spearheaded by our president, is so completely secret that only bigwigs at the top of the world corporate structure are allowed to see what is going on — and even then, only after signing a confidentiality agreement and promising to say nothing to the public.
Get on the Web while you still can and read about ACTA and the next big meeting in January. A few bloggers are fighting the good fight on this and following what could be the biggest story of the digital age, especially James Love from The Huffington Post. Were it not for what already exists of the many noodly appendages of the Internet bringing truth to power, this top-secret global business agreement would never have seen the light of day.
Our Congress seems to be lying down on this one, so it is up to other free countries to enforce their own constitutional law and protect the avenues of free speech on the Internet.
Obama is going above American law and trying to make your Internet service providers liable for content that some soulless corporate lawyer decides is infringing on their copyright.
It’s sort of like holding I-75 accountable for speeding cars, but much more damaging.
On top of that, Obama and ACTA want to hold Web sites legally responsible for user-generated content. Vaya con Dios, YouTube.
This has been an absolute wet dream of the powerful vested interests of big business since the Web began a few decades ago, but it has also been the defining hallmark of the Obama era.
Senate bill 773, The Cybersecurity Act of 2009, was introduced in April and goes even further than this ACTA mess.
Under the traditional American power grab of protecting the “free flow of commerce,” S.773 wants to give the president total power to completely shut down the Internet for a vague “national security emergency” with no limitations or timelines for removal.
The Patriot Act seems like a pinprick compared to Obama and his Freddy Krueger fingers slashing up communications freedoms.
We are living in the Golden Age of the Internet. The Web will never again be as free as it is right now, nor will it be as explosively evolving. Don’t get used to the way ideas flash across the world in an instant, or to the speed that life seems to rocket along at in a spectacular upward spiral.
The kind of power the Internet now holds scares the real powers that control the world. If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest in the world. Not that long ago, standing armies would be dispatched to tear apart a group even a fraction of that size. Nowadays, we have politicians and lawyers butchering behind closed doors.
Tommy Maple is an international communications graduate student. His column appears on Thursdays.
