Internet freedom could turn on ‘middle countries’ — Media Access Project

Internet freedom could turn on ‘middle countries’

8 February 2012 No Comment

By Kenneth Corbin, CIO US

With so much attention focused on online censorship in highly restrictive countries such as China, Iran and Syria, the discussion of global Internet freedom often has tended to exclude the large class of more moderate nations with rapidly growing online populations with only a rudimentary set of laws and policies for the Web.

To the extent that the issue has received coverage in the mainstream press, the banner headlines have generally been reserved for the higher-profile flare-ups, recently seen in various Internet crackdowns amid the Arab spring uprisings or Google’s 2010 standoff with China over online censorship.

But for Bob Boorstin, Google’s director of corporate and policy communications, the greater uncertainty, both for U.S. businesses looking to new markets overseas and global Internet users, is found in the countries that have neither made forceful affirmations of online freedom nor implemented rigid, state-sanctioned censorship frameworks.

“The countries that I’m most concerned with in the next couple of years and that I think are most worth looking at are those in the middle — the Brazils and the Indias and Argentinas and the Chiles and the North African countries and Southeast Asian [countries], like Indonesia, the Philippines. And the question I want to put on the table is which way are they going to go?” Boorstin said here at an event hosted by the Media Access Project, a nonprofit public-interest law firm and advocacy group. “That’s the question that I’m focused on at the moment.”

via mediaaccess.org