....as the history of radio and television has shown, once the government guarantees ‘free’ access to a communications medium, it will inevitably exercise control over its content--i.e., censorship.For a concrete example of where this is going, recall the recent incident in which a British QUANGO (quasi-nongovernmental organization,) on the strength of a picture of a supposedly suggestive rock album cover, cut off access not only to the picture of the album cover, but also to the text of the article about the album's history - and also disabled all British access to the editing and content uploading servers of the Wikipedia.
In fact, this plan already comes with censorship strings attached; the FCC has declared that this ‘free’ Internet must filter out pornography and other material deemed unsuitable for children. Not only will this prevent vast numbers of Americans from accessing content the government regards as inappropriate, but it will unavoidably lead to massive self-censorship by websites struggling to avoid government sanitization.
What's a QUANGO? What does "quasi-nongovernmental" mean? It means a government agency set up not to look like a government agency, to give a work-around to those pesky Enlightenment principles that get in the way of a government's ability to do what would surely become "controversial" if that government were to do it directly. For example, most Americans would have taken a dim view of an official US Government agency encouraging mortgage fraud - and so this was done through a pair of QUANGOs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Similarly, neither the British nor the American government wants to look like it has an official bureau of censorship - so it delegates the job of telling the Internet service providers what to ban, to QUANGOs, in the United Kingdom the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF,) and in the United States the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC.)
In the Wikipedia case, the IWF claimed that the cover of the 1976 rock album "Virgin Killer" was obscene because of "erotic posing" by a minor girl. I remember seeing the album in record store windows in the seventies, and thinking that the pose in the picture resembled the pose of the winged girl angels, naked as a symbol of innocence, that flank, on each side, the Virgin Mary on her way to Heaven, in paintings I've seen in North-Central Europe's Roman Catholic cathedrals and churches. But in close-up, the girl's pubic area is hidden behind what looks like cracks in a glass pane covering the picture. I finally remembered that "crack" is a vulgar term for the female genitalia, and figured out that the broken glass could be interpreted as suggesting a broken hymen. So now, a bad taste in puns, or bad taste in rock music, or both, is enough to get you banned from the British Internet. Who could have known?
In the United States, the NCMEC maintains a similar Internet blacklist, but in greater secrecy - and there is no way to find out if you're banned. To date, the NCMEC has avoided tangling with websites as visible as the Wikipedia, perhaps on the theory that a frog never jumps out of the pot if boiled slowly enough. But when the NCMEC gets to censor the government's "free" Internet, it won't be so bashful any more. And, given the choice of tax-funded "free" (but censored) Internet access, and open Internet access that you have to pay for every month, who will ever pay to find out what the NCMEC has seen fit to ban?
With the new administration unlikely to appoint any more Christianists to the Supreme Court, the prospect that the government will be able to impose this kind of berserk Christianist censorship directly on private ISPs in the United States is no longer on the horizon. So George W. Bush's lame-duck FCC found a wedge strategy to impose censorship anyway, figuring that the other party will never turn down a chance to skin the taxpayers for the cost of a "free" Internet (plus a service charge.) Will the suckers fall for it?
You can have either a free Internet with "free" as in "free speech," or a free Internet with "free" as in "free beer." It's one or the other, guys; you can't have both.
2 comments:
Adam-
Back on the salon, a number of market anarchists argued against the acceptance of what Objectivists consider to be the legitimate functions of government on the grounds that state actors have an inherent tendency to abuse their power, and thus the only answer is to deny them this power in order to prevent their abuse of it.
Your argument, if I remember correctly, was that this idea rests on the notion of original sin. You cited Canada as an example of a political culture of greater integrity where some abuses assumed natural and inevitable in America do not, in fact, occur. Your point, I believe, was that given a rational culture with properly constructed institutional structures human beings are perfectly capable of using potentially very dangerous power with strict regard for individual rights.
Why doesn't this argument apply to proposed functions of government which Objectivists do not defend- in this case, why is it not possible in principle for the state to provide free internet service while refusing to control the content? If the state can be trusted to employ the police power without the constant fear that this power will be extended to deny individual rights, why could the state be similarly trusted on this issue? In other words, why isn't an honest social democracy or liberal welfare state possible?
This isn't a question as to what (if any) are the proper functions of government, or as to whether social democracy or the welfare state are good and just. It is a queastion as to why the fear of the abuse of power is reasonable in some cases but not others. It seem reasonable to me to say that there exist some state universities and bus systems which do perform their functions without corruption and abuse, while there exist state police, courts, and militaries whose potential power is greatly to be feared. Free beer might be unjust, but that's not the same question as to whether it could be provided with genuine regard for free speech*.
Doesn't the Madisonian or Hayekian arguement that human beings cannot be trusted with power apply either to both cases, or to neither? If state provision of the internet is a natural magnet for power-lusters, then aren't the police force or the army?
* Actually, I imagine that state subsidised beer consumption might encourage some very free speech, assuming that you could actually choke down the beer.
Aster,
Yes, there is a tendency for psychopaths to be attracted to the institutions of political power, whether those institutions be the "defense agencies" of the "market-anarchists," the "communal justice" lynch mobs of the left-anarchists, or governments. As they say in New Jersey, a cop is a psychopath who flunked out of law school, and a felon is a psychopath who flunked out of the Police Academy. The answer is to limit political power as much as possible: have only one minimal institution of political power, rather than too many for the public to keep our eyes on; restrict that single institution to the minimal functions necessary to put retaliatory force under objective control; limit it to operate by objective rules, and keep it completely transparent to public scrutiny to make sure that it abides by those objective limits and rules, unlike private individuals and institutions who can keep their actions private; have a population that is armed and skilled in arms, for self defense against any violent criminal, including those in government; and - this is something that is just now becoming possible - use objective, neuroscience-based screening to keep psychopaths out of government.
Expanding government functions beyond the minimum required for the protection of individual rights is one way to breach those conditions. QUANGOs like IWF or Blackwater, which remove transparency from political operations, are another. Combining the two, as with the FCC scheme for a free-beer Internet censored by NCMEC, is the next level of breach, one that would put political psychopaths in a position to limit, in secret, what American are allowed to know, and thus in a position to control, in secret, what Americans are allowed to think.
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