International Cooperation for a Free and Open Internet,” by Nick Clegg

The article is here; the introductory paragraphs:

The Internet is the latest in a long line of communications technologies that have enabled greater freedom of expression. From the printing press to radio to television to the cell phone, technological advances have allowed more people to express themselves, share news, and spread ideas. At each stage, speech was further democratized, empowering people who had previously been unable to make their voices heard and challenging the influence of the traditional guardians of public information—including the state, the church, politicians, and the media. These advances were often initially met with excitement and enthusiasm, followed by a public backlash fueled by a mix of legitimate concerns about the impact of technology on society and moral panic fueled by interest groups whose power was being challenged. Over time, these pendulum swings have reached a point of rest through a combination of the normalization of technologies in society, the development of commonly understood norms and standards, and the introduction of guardrails through regulation.

The Internet has enabled the most radical democratization of language yet, allowing anyone with an Internet connection and a phone or computer to express themselves, connect with people regardless of geographic barriers, organize based on shared interests, and share their experiences on the all over the world in an instant. Over the past two decades, social media and instant messaging apps have accelerated face-to-face communication over the internet – and their popularity has exploded. More than a third of the world’s population uses Facebook every day. More than 140 billion messages are sent daily across Meta’s messaging apps, including Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram.

These technologies have enabled grassroots movements to grow rapidly, challenge established authorities and orthodoxies, and thereby change the world—from the Arab Spring to the Black Lives Matter movement to #MeToo. A decade ago, sociologist Larry Diamond called social media a “liberation technology.” Without the ability of ordinary people to share text, images and videos in near real time and amplify them across networks of people connected through social media apps like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, public support for these and other causes is growing would never have been possible. Social media also enabled millions of spontaneous, community-based, grassroots initiatives to help the vulnerable or celebrate frontline workers to launch and thrive during the emergency phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, and allowed millions of small businesses to stay afloat and reach customers during lockdowns.

It would be naive to assume that connection inevitably leads to progress or harmony. The free and open Internet is not a panacea. In retrospect, the techno-utopianism of the Arab Spring phase of social media was never going to last. But the pendulum has now, as in the wake of previous technological advances, swung far in the other direction, toward a phase of techno-pessimism in which many critics denounce social media as the cause of many of today’s societal ills. This backlash has brought us to a pivotal moment for the internet. Politicians around the world are now responding to the noise with a new wave of laws and regulations that will shape the Internet for generations to come.

The radical liberalization of expression enabled by the Internet brings with it its own problems and dilemmas: from what to do about the spread of misinformation, hate speech and other forms of “bad” speech, to a range of novel questions surrounding it Privacy and security, well-being and more. These challenges are worth detailed analysis and discussion in their own right – and they are the focus of other essays in this volume.

It is right that policymakers around the world are grappling with the many challenges posed by the Internet and beginning to put in place a new generation of guardrails to mitigate the potential harms. But if we accept as a starting point that, despite all the disadvantages, giving people the opportunity to express themselves directly is a positive thing for societies overall, and that this has been made possible by the openness, borderlessness and largely free access of the Internet, then we must not take it for granted.

In its early days, many thought that the Internet’s distributed architecture and multi-stakeholder governance model would be enough to keep it open and free. The Internet was believed to be inherently a technology beyond the control of any single state or organization – an idea perhaps best expressed in poet and political activist John Perry Barlow’s end-of-the-millennium manifesto ” A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” As he put it rather grandly: “Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of the mind. In the name of the future, I ask you from the past to leave us alone.” You are not welcome here. You have no sovereignty where we gather. Unfortunately, this idealism has proven misplaced. The events of the last few years have shown that the design of the Internet is not enough to ensure protection from state control.

The conflict between limitless open communication and authoritarian control from above is one of the greatest tensions in the modern Internet age. Authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes have repeatedly shown that they use the Internet, among other things, to suppress dissent. They often try to do two things: 1) censor what their citizens can say and 2) cut off their citizens from the rest of the global Internet. And as we’ve seen firsthand at Meta, they’re targeting their citizens’ use of social media and messaging apps.