UK writer: ‘Europe must take back the Web’
For years I’ve wondered if ex-White House advisor Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Assocation of America, might not be a foreign agent. Hilary Rosen, too–the CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. No, not really, but almost. Along with many others, I’ve warned of the intense hatred that our clueless copyright laws are stirring up against the States. Brilliant way to recruit hackers for Saddam. Regardless of the consequences, Hollywood and Washington want to inflict our antiquated intellectual property models on the whole planet. Who says the Iraq crisis is the only source of divergence from Europe?
Now, from the United Kingdom, has come some anti-Yank xenophobia that Valenti and Rosen and their congressional allies vastly deserve, or at least would if the damage could be limited to them.
The difference is that Bill Thompson, ranting in the Register, is only a writer-consultant and presumably isn’t in a position to bribe legislators with massive campaign donations, unlike Hollywood and the American recording industry. “Damn the Constitution: Europe must take back the Web,” is the headline of a column that he wrote last year, and that I discovered today through Luke Francl, a TeleRead contributor who had read my item below. Seems that Thompson’s call for hyper regulation of search engines was very much in character.
In fairness to Thompson, he is on the market, er, on the mark, on many a point. I’d agree when he complains: “We have already seen US law, in the form of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, used to persuade hosts in other countries to pull material or limit its availability.” And how right he is about some other matters such as “Congressman Howard Berman’s ridiculous proposal to give copyright holders immunity from prosecution of they hack into P2P networks.” I applaud, too, when he writes: “In Europe our copyright laws allow lending of material, and so material players licensed for use within the dataspace would not restrict personal copying or lending, although they would respect other rights.”
Thompson errs big time, however, when he says: “I believe that the time has come to speak out in favour of a regulated network; an Internet where each country can set its own rules for how its citizens, companies, courts and government work with and manage those parts of the network that fall within its jurisdiction; an Internet that reflects the diversity of the world’s legal, moral and cultural choices instead of simply propagating U.S. hegemony; an Internet that is subject to political control instead of being an uncontrollable experiment in radical capitalism. It is time to reclaim the net from the Americans.”
But as grouchy as I am about Valenti and Rosen, would Thompson’s approach really be better? How about the billions of people in China? I like it when U.S. conglomerates resist Chinese efforts to turn the Net into just another arm of that government. If anything, they should take harder stands. Blogger, Google’s newest purchase, via Pyra Labs, won points with me when the Chinese banned its Web site. That’s what these blogs are all about—freedom of speech, a concept that is hardly American only, unless the ancient Greeks just happened to have settled in the New World. Simply put, America is not just about Valenti and Rosen. It is also about Pyra Labs and the other innovative free spirits. Linus Torvalds did move to Silicon Valley; I doubt he’ll be relocating to Beijing soon. Chinese censorship is just as loathsome as the American corporate variety.
Recently I was reminded of the obnoxiousness of Beijing’s censors–in the most direct way this week–when a client working for a labor union said that a local government agency might block employees from accessing the union’s site. The agency had already attempted to block his members’ email. I told him about Google’s hassles with the Chinese, and he sent out an electronic newsletter invoking the parallel, in effect warning the thuggish bureaucrats that he would play it up in the media. That is how the Net can empower democracy, not just here in the States but elsewhere.
But what about different national values? The real answer isn’t to try to remake the Net the Thompson way, so it’s simply a creature of local elites. Instead governments at all levels should establish alternatives such as TeleRead-style libraries that could reflect and promote local culture and values without imposing them on the rest of the world. The role of governments should not be to take away the richness of the Net from citizens, but rather to add treasures of their own.
Note: Readers might also be intersted in Andrew Orlowski’s skeptical dialogue with Thompson.
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