or
How
Digital and
Meatspace
censorship Differ
Pranesh Prakash
Twitter: @pranesh_prakash / XMPP: pranesh@cis-india.org / Freenode: the-solipsist
Centre for Internet & Society +
Information Society Project, Yale Law School +
Non-Commercial Users' Constituency, ICANN +
Creative Commons India +
+ + + +
"same human rights online and offline"
publishers
+
printing presses"common carriers"
"online intermediaries need stronger protection"
"simplistic sovereignty can't extend online"
"too much speech to regulate effectively"
"what's lawful offline can't be made unlawful online"
"court orders!"
"technology makes censorship impossible"
"politicians & bureaucrats don't understand technology"
utopianism / libertarianism / anarchism
these "actor-act" categories trace part of the shift in:
"Traditional" vs. "Digital" Censorship
"Visible" vs. "Invisible" Censorship
importantly
censorship is not just silencing;
censorship is productive
price for censorship
death, jail, conformity
autonomy, dignity
but we fight back
literature, jokes,
resistance, subversion
state-{compelled, aided, independent}
unaccountable private regulation
+
self-censorship
we can't fight that which we cannot see
(related idea in surveillance:
Panopticon Paradox: what we don't know can't induce conformity)
"Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules"
(source: World of Warcraft & Yahoo)
only way to study it is as a participant
CIS's fake, fraudulent, frivolous, fun complaints
6 of 7 complied + no transparency + over-censorship
copyright as censorship infrastructure
jurisprudential justification
contract + property rights
rhetoric
"innovation", "freedom"
as infrastructure of private controlmunicipal wifi?
facebook?
but: not "plaza pública"!
not all speech regulation is harmful
(casteist / racist / sexist / ableist speech, etc.)
not all private censorship is bad
Haterz hate lolcats
Doges!!! such disgust, so crap
philosophical foundations, societal forces, politics as power, soft paternalism, public accommodation laws, net neutrality, regulation on the basis of network effects, internet as social infrastructure, sousveillance, historical examples, metaphors, (why are you still reading this?)
immediate: visibility through transparency