If you have to be bad, be doubly good to make up
Published: 02 Feb 2006 15:10 GMT
There is no hotter topic than online freedom and the strange alliances it creates. Last night, the House of Lords defeated a Government attempt to give police constables the power to shut down Web sites. Much as we support the police and the principles of representative democracy, their lordships got that one right.
Likewise, we find ourselves in rare agreement with the thoughts of Chairman Bill when he said "You may be able to take a very visible Web site and say that something shouldn't be there, but if there's a desire by the population to know something, it's going to get out."
There is no way that information can be permanently denied in a connected culture, and attempts to do so are frequently counterproductive. There is nothing like calling a newspaper cartoon offensive to promote its rapid distribution on the Internet and maximising its offence; such are the risks of misunderstanding the mechanisms of a free society.
Yet even for its supporters, freedom is hard work and it can do with all the help it can get. Eric Schmidt has said that Google went as far as drawing a spectrum of evil to compare a compliant presence in China with staying out altogether. Choosing the lesser of two evils rarely sits with a principled rejection of all things evil, but we live in a wicked world. We may not be able to live apart from the things we detest, as Google has admitted, but we can like the Lords work against them
If the companies concerned are determined to operate under the control of authoritarian regimes, then we look forward to an equal determination to bypass those controls. There are plenty of technical ways to provide or encourage hard to censor services for people behind the great firewalls, and there are plenty of ways for Microsoft, Yahoo and Google to allow — or even promote — such use. "Do no evil" may be unobtainable: saying good things is worthwhile, but doing them is best.
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