Internet Suppression and Amnesty International
posted by Susan Stark

Lately, Amnesty International has broadened it's human rights focus to include foreign government suppression of the internet, and the use of IT companies like Google and Yahoo to supply information to these governments about dissidents using their services. The examples that Amnesty uses are countries like China, Vietnam, Tunisia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.

I'll take Amnesty's word for it that these countries are indeed repressing the internet and using the internet to track down dissidents. But unfortunately, there is one country that Amnesty overlooks at it's website:

The United States.

Yes, the US is currently trying to censor the internet, with dissidents along with it. Companies like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner provide the bandwidth which internet traffic flows through. The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are the vehicles which drive on this information superhighway, and websites are the people inside the vehicles. The bandwidth providers wish to institute tolls along this highway whenever and wherever they wish, and the ISPs that can't pay the tolls will be stuck, and those that can will pass through with ease. These tolls will be passed on to websites.

This means that the more money a website gives to it's network, the more access it has on the internet.

This is plainly discriminatory, and it's plain censorship. Smaller internet businesses will suffer because they can't pay what larger businesses can, and people with ideas and opinions will only get heard according to what they can pay. Which means that a corporate hack like Rush Limbaugh will pass with ease on the highway, but not an anarchist in Kansas City. On the flip side, a liberal corporate hack like Air America will pass through more quickly than an Alabaman with a confederate flag on his truck.

As it stands right now, we can get to the anarchist and the Alabaman just as quickly as Limbaugh and Air America, but if the cable and telephone bandwidth providers have their way, we won't in the future.

And it's not just websites. Internet radio is also currently in jeopardy. On March 2, 2007, there was a ruling passed by the Copyright Royalty Board that increased the royalties internet radio must pay to artists and record labels by 500%. Most internet radio would have to go out of business if it had to pay these royalties. And ironically, most artists and record labels are against this, because it would cut off a very important venue for their music to be heard. Internet radio is currently fighting tooth and nail against this ruling.

This may not be a dictatorship censoring dissident websites and putting the dissidents in jail, but it is just as serious. If Amnesty International treats Chinese internet censorship as a human rights issue, then it should treat American and corporate internet censorship as a human rights issue as well. If censorship by the Tunisian government is wrong, than so is censorship by Comcast.

Amnesty International's website: http://irrepressible.info

Save The Internet website: http://www.savetheinternet.com/

Save Internet Radio: http://www.savenetradio.org/