Comment: Victory for free speech and the web
Tuesday, 13, Oct 2009 12:00
The web's response to an injunction on the Guardian reveals the liberating power of the internet. Hopefully, this is a taste of things to come.
By Ian Dunt
When J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, was told at a party once that it was the tragedy of science that its inventions were always used for negative ends, he gave an answer which I always found particularly pertinent.
"No," he replied. "It is the tragedy of humanity." And that's generally how it goes with man's technological advancement. But then came the internet, which presumably will one day be considered man's ultimate invention. It changed everything. We realised instantly what we had invented, as a species. Even in those first years, already the extent of the changes this thing would bring were evident.
Porn, some of it far more extreme than what we were used to, was suddenly available to children across the world at the click of a button. News became free. Marriages broke under the weight of the opportunities offered by Friends Reunited and Facebook, as people who thought they would never meet again were suddenly closer than they had imagined. Movies and music were suddenly available for free on peer-to-peer websites, and bands like the Arctic Monkeys found success themselves while circumnavigating record companies' functions. You could gamble away your last penny from the comfort of your soon-to-be reclaimed house. You could hire a prostitute, get an arts and crafts book delivered, or do the weekly shop online. Businesses everywhere were affected. The world got quicker, and more convenient, but also further apart, as we formed ties across oceans with people of similar interests and relied less on those of the community around us.
For politics, it seemed the anarchic defence to governments which were quickly learning to use technology for authoritarian ends. From the DNA database, to ID cards, to biometric passports, the state saw new technology and thought of new ways to limit people. It's always been that way.
The internet, and to a lesser extent mobile phones, were liberating. Text messaging became pivotal to the democratic process in Ukraine, allowing hundred of thousands of youths to coordinate their movements in Kiev as they protested the 2004 election result. Meanwhile, blogs, Facebook and Twitter became standard issue items for rebels and discontents in authoritarian countries across the globe, with internet companies agonising over what to do in China in particular.
There were big downsides. Media outlets saw their income shrivel up as people could go online for free, or simply because print couldn't keep up with the new speed of the world. They sacked journalists and made the remainder write more copy, leading to worse reporting. Blogs started to claim a role as news providers which their subjective nature did nothing to justify.
Today was an important day. Today the internet lived up to all its promise. It began with an injunction on the Guardian by Carter Ruck, a law firm specialising in the media, which is very rarely referred to by its real name by those in the industry. The firm banned the paper from reporting on a parliamentary question from Paul Farrelly to justice secretary Jack Straw, published in today's House of Commons order paper. It's a measure of how acutely unfair, authoritarian and in league with the powerful Britain's libel laws are that a firm would even consider it possible to pursue this course of action. But yes, they asked for the public to be barred from learning about a question from an elected MP to a representative of the government, because it concerned their rich clients.
The question concerned issues with which I am particularly interested, but let's leave that aside for a moment. If it had stuck, a terrible precedent would have been set whereby the powerful gained a pivotal new power over the people of Great Britain: the power to turn their elected parliament into a shadowy body, as impermeable and hostile to them as the lobbies of corporate buildings.
Twitter went bonkers. Wonderfully so. So wonderfully, in fact, that a human rights lawyer was barely able to conceal his glee when I called him this afternoon. The #trafigura and #carterruck tags shot straight to the top of Twitter's trends, exposing Carter Ruck's clients to precisely the publicity they had hoped to avoid. By early afternoon, the injunction was lifted.
A small story. Nothing life-changing. But the most important thing to come from today was what the internet prevented. It prevented a precedent being set which would have marked off even parliament from democratic participation. And it hinted at something else: the peculiar power the internet grants through its freedom. Today showed how millions of connected individuals can circumnavigate the awesome power of corporations and government, can breach their layers of information control, and affect change. We've been theorising about this for ages. This was practical.
The world is changing fast. Today's events were so heavily reliant on Twitter they would have been unthinkable even two years ago, maybe even one year ago. But for those who dread technology, and the unfamiliar anarchic world it has forced on us, today is proof we can put it to good use.
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