On The Wall Street Journal, two fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations discuss the attacks on Internet freedom by United States allies worldwide, including Egypt’s jailing of Kareem Amer: Tangled Web.
Excerpts:
The past few weeks have seen a chilling crackdown on Internet freedom by American allies. An Egyptian appeals court upheld a four-year prison term for Abdel Kareem Soliman, a blogger who outraged religious authorities, while a Turkish judge ordered that Internet companies block YouTube, citing videos that disparage the memory of Turkey’s founder, Ataturk.
This is nothing new: Bahrain, where the U.S. 5th Fleet is based, has been hounding bloggers and Internet activists for the past three years. While the United States has focused its attention and outrage on China, Internet censorship has become a problem with friends and foes alike. Adapting the U.S. approach to China elsewhere would mean singling out U.S. allies for opprobrium at a time when America needs all the friends it can find. The smart alternative is to shift from a bilateral approach to making the promotion of freedom on the Web a genuinely global policy.
The Internet has been hailed as a technology that empowers average citizens to make their voices heard. Its dispersed nature, most assume, makes it difficult to control. Yet countries generally route Internet traffic through a small number of checkpoints, allowing governments to efficiently monitor and control what happens on the Web.
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Washington should not go so far as to bar U.S. companies from operating in states like Turkey, but it should make clear that its diplomats will not actively facilitate IT investment from U.S. firms in countries that are repressing bloggers and restricting freedom of speech on the Web. Making investment in information technology dependent on good Web citizenship has the potential to encourage meaningful change in emerging economies like Turkey and Egypt as well as small but important countries like Bahrain. Leaders in all three countries are hungry for Silicon Valley to invest in their economies.
The U.S. should also exert global leadership. A first step would be to sponsor a United Nations Declaration of Internet and Electronic Freedom. To be sure, the U.N.’s enforcement mechanisms are hopelessly weak, but the declaration can serve as a standard against which countries can be judged. Using universal standards set forth in the new U.N. Declaration, the State Department should include a status report on Internet freedom in its annual report on human rights around the world.
