Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this analysis from Just Security: Huawei's plans for 6G and beyond make U.S. concerns over 5G look paltry: Huawei is proposing a fundamental internet redesign, which it calls "New IP," designed to build "intrinsic security" into the web. Intrinsic security means that individuals must register to use the internet, and authorities can shut off an individual user's internet access at any time. In short, Huawei is looking to integrate China's "social credit," surveillance, and censorship regimes into the internet's architecture...

To avoid scrutiny of New IP's shortcomings, Huawei has circumvented international standards bodies where experts might challenge the technical shortcomings of the proposal. Instead, Huawei has worked through the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU), where Beijing holds more political sway...

Huawei dominance on New IP and 6G would not only create a less free, less interoperable internet, it would pave the way for authoritarian governments to gain expanded say over future changes to the internet for years to come.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: China's internet regulator has launched a hotline for citizens to report online comments that defame the ruling Communist Party and its approved description of history ahead of the Party's upcoming 100th anniversary. The new hotline will enable internet users to stop the spread of "mistaken opinions" and create a "good public opinion atmosphere" to pave the way for the July 1 occasion, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said in a notice. People can also send in tip-offs via the CAC's website and app.

"For a while now, some people with ulterior motiveshave spread historically nihilistic false statements online, maliciously distorting, slandering and denying Party, national and military history in an attempt to confuse people's thinking," the notice said. "We hope that most internet users will play an active role in supervising societyand enthusiastically report harmful information." "Historically nihilistic" information, in official rhetoric, is content that incites doubt about the Party's account of the past.

It will accept four types of content complaints: distortions of history, attacks on the Party's "leadership, guiding ideology, principles or policies," the defamation of heroes and martyrs, and "denials of the excellence of traditional Chinese culture, revolutionary culture and advanced socialist culture." The CAC notice did not explain what punishments would be in store for violators. China already frequently detains and jails people for online speech deemed politically inappropriate.

Time magazine reports: On March 10, photos and videos on Twitter were loading more slowly than usual for users in Russia. It was not a network fault or server error but a deliberate move by Russia's state internet regulator Roskomnadzor to limit traffic to the social media site, in what experts say was the first public use of controversial new technology that the Russian authorities introduced after 2019... The action came after Russian authorities had accused Twitter and other social networks in January of failing to delete posts urging children to take part in anti-government protests... In response to the slowdown, Twitter said it did not support any "unlawful behaviour" and was "deeply concerned" by the regulator's attempts to block online public conversation.

But on March 16 Roskomnadzor gave a fresh warning that if Twitter refused to comply with its removal requests within a month, the regulator will consider blocking access to the social network in Russia outright... Twitter has only 700,000 monthly active users in Russia, a fraction of the 68.7 million in the U.S. Despite its use by opposition politicians and journalists the Kremlin doesn't consider it "the most dangerous" platform, says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian cyber expert. Experts say that the authorities used the Twitter slowdown to test technology that could be used to disrupt other, more popular social networks like Facebook, which has an estimated 23 million active monthly users in Russia...

As the government has ramped up its efforts to control what citizens can access online it also has several projects in the pipeline that experts say is part of a strategy to push foreign tech companies out of the Russian market completely. From April 1, Roskomnadzor requires tech companies selling smartphones in Russia to prompt users to download government-approved apps, including search engines, maps and payment systems... In November 2019, the Kremlin made its most controversial move yet toward controlling the country's Internet infrastructure with the so-called "sovereign Internet" law. A series of amendments to existing laws theoretically enabled the Russian authorities to isolate "RuNet" — the unofficial name for websites hosted in Russia and sites on Russian domain names — from the global web in vaguely defined times of crisis, giving the Russian authorities control over flows of data coming in and out of the country... The "sovereign Internet" law required Internet Service Providers to install Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) equipment, which has been used by some countries, like China, for censorship. DPI equipment enables Russia to circumvent providers, automatically block content the government has banned and reroute internet traffic.

Russia's major ISPs have now installed DPI equipment, according to Alena Epifanova, a researcher at the German Council on Foreign Relations. But no one knows if or when Russia will be able to cut off its Internet from the global web.
The article also notes Russia passed a law in December which gives Roskomnadzor "the power to restrict or fully block websites that, according to officials, discriminate against Russian state media."

Parler confirmed Saturday that it had referred dozens of violent posts to America's Federal Bureau of Investigation, reports Newsweek. But even after a blog post explaining its reasons, "some of the platform's users were less than impressed." Parler, which faced significant backlash in the wake of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by former President Donald Trump's supporters, referred violent content to the FBI at least 50 times prior to the pro-Trump riot, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The social media site shared a link to the article, drawing backlash from some members of the online platform. Parler has built its platform by positioning itself as being opposed to censorship and staunchly in favor of free speech.

"In reaction to yesterday's news stories, some users have raised questions about the practice of referring violent or inciting content to law enforcement. The First Amendment does not protect violence inciting speech, nor the planning of violent acts. Such content violates Parler's TOS. Any violent content shared with law enforcement was posted publicly and brought to our attention primarily via user reporting. And, as it is posted publicly, it can properly be referred to law enforcement by anyone. Parler remains steadfast in protecting your right to free speech," Parler posted on Saturday in response to criticism.

But some users of the site were still unhappy with Parler's decision.

"I don't like snitches," user MelodySuarez wrote in response to the explanation.
Users "vented their fury at the site's apparent willingness to report its users despite its pitch of protecting free speech," Newsweek reported in an earlier article.

"Parler is a fraud," one user had complained.

Sidestepping a crackdown on internet use since the military seized power almost two months ago, hundreds of thousands of protesters and citizens in Myanmar are finding different ways to communicate online, downloading tools to bypass censorship restrictions and turning to alternative media sources and underground networks, according to new research. From a report: They have moved to a mirror site of Facebook on the dark web, used apps that rely on Bluetooth technology to continue messaging each other and turned to lesser known social media platforms to stay connected, according to Recorded Future, a closely held cybersecurity firm based near Boston. Myanmar citizens are following the lead of protesters in Hong Kong, Belarus and elsewhere who have found creative ways around government internet restrictions. Protesters from some of those countries are now providing guidance and support to Myanmar, and online forums are offering tips on how its citizens can stay connected. "In the history of Myanmar and all the coups they've experienced and all this political upheaval, it looks to be the first time the people really had this type of access to alternative platforms, and have used it to reach out to international organizations and other countries for help," said Charity Wright, cyber threat intelligence analyst at Recorded Future, who has been studying the impact of the crackdown on the internet for the past month and a half.

Microsoft's professional networking site LinkedIn is pausing new member sign-ups for its service in China while it works to ensure it's in compliance with local law. From a report: "We're a global platform with an obligation to respect the laws that apply to us, including adhering to Chinese government regulations for our localized version of LinkedIn in China," the company said in a statement Tuesday. LinkedIn, which entered China in 2014, is one of the few U.S. social networking companies allowed in the country as it has agreed to restrict some content to adhere to state censorship rules. Currently, the service has 52 million users in Mainland China.

Tim Wu coined the phrase "net neutrality". He's the author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age , and Bloomberg calls him an "outspoken advocate for aggressive antitrust enforcement against U.S. technology giants."

They add that now the Columbia University media law professor "is joining the White House an adviser, signaling that the Biden administration is preparing to square off against the industry's biggest companies." Wu will join the National Economic Council as a special assistant on technology and competition policy, the White House said Friday. Wu's appointment elevates to a senior position in the administration a leading antitrust expert, favored by progressives, who has assailed the power of dominant tech companies like Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Facebook Inc. Both companies were sued by U.S. antitrust enforcers last year for allegedly abusing their monopoly power...

After the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general sued Facebook in December, Wu wrote a column in the New York Times comparing Facebook's strategy of buying competitors to Standard Oil's tactics in the 19th century. "What the federal government and states are doing is reasserting a fundamental rule for all American business: You cannot simply buy your way out of competition," Wu wrote. "Facebook, led by its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has taken that strategy to a smirking and egregious extreme, acquiring multiple companies to stifle the competitive threat they pose."

Wu joins the Biden administration as tech giants are grappling with a reckoning in Washington that could transform the industry. The Facebook lawsuit could lead to the breakup of the company, while the Justice Department's complaint against Google targets the heart of its business — Internet search. Antitrust enforcers have also opened investigations of Apple Inc. and Amazon... Wu argued in his book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, that rising concentration across the economy has led to concentrated wealth and power as well as radicalized politics that threatens American democracy.
A White House press briefing Friday included this response to a question about Biden's plans for big tech companies: The President has been clear — on the campaign, and, probably, more recently — that he stands up to the abuse of power, and that includes the abuse of power from big technology companies and their executives. And Tim will help advance the President's agenda, which includes addressing the economic and social challenges posed by the growing power of tech platforms; promoting competition and addressing monopoly and market power issues; expanding access to broadband for low-income and rural communities across the country...

We don't have new policy to announce here... Just that the President believes, as he's talked about before, that it's important to promote competition and address monopoly and market power issues.
Interestingly, last August Wu also wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled "A TikTok Ban is Overdue," arguing that China's "extensive blocking, censorship and surveillance violate just about every principle of internet openness and decency. China keeps a closed and censorial internet economy at home while its products enjoy full access to open markets abroad..." The asymmetry is unfair and ought no longer be tolerated. The privilege of full internet access — the open internet — should be extended only to companies from countries that respect that openness themselves...

[China] bans not only most foreign competitors to its tech businesses but also foreign sources of news, religious instruction and other information, while using the internet to promote state propaganda and engage in foreign electoral interference... Few foreign companies are allowed to reach Chinese citizens with ideas or services, but the world is fully open to China's online companies...

The idealists who thought the internet would automatically create democracy in China were wrong. Some think that it is a tragic mistake for the United States to violate the principles of internet openness that were pioneered in this country. But there is also such a thing as being a sucker. If China refuses to follow the rules of the open internet, why continue to give it access to internet markets around the world...?

We need to wake up to the game we are playing when it comes to the future of the global internet. The idealists of the 1990s and early '00s believed that building a universal network, a kind of digital cosmopolitanism, would lead to world peace and harmony. No one buys that fantasy any longer. But if we want decency and openness to survive on the internet — surely a more attainable goal — the nations that hold such values need to begin fighting to protect them.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this report from ProPublica: As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook's top executives faced a political dilemma. Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People's Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted.

Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?

It wasn't a particularly close call for the company's leadership, newly disclosed emails show. "I am fine with this," wrote Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's No. 2 executive, in a one-sentence message to a team that reviewed the page. Three years later, YPG's photos and updates about the Turkish military's brutal attacks on the Kurdish minority in Syria still can't be viewed by Facebook users inside Turkey. The conversations, among other internal emails obtained by ProPublica, provide an unusually direct look into how tech giants like Facebook handle censorship requests made by governments that routinely limit what can be said publicly...

Publicly, Facebook has underscored that it cherishes free speech: "We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, and we work hard to protect and defend these values around the world," the company wrote in a blog post last month about a new Turkish law requiring that social media firms have a legal presence in the country. "More than half of the people in Turkey rely on Facebook to stay in touch with their friends and family, to express their opinions and grow their businesses." But behind the scenes in 2018, amid Turkey's military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with the government's demands. Deliberations, the emails show, were centered on keeping the platform operational, not on human rights. "The page caused us a few PR fires in the past," one Facebook manager warned of the YPG material...
"Facebook confirmed to ProPublica that it made the decision to restrict the page in Turkey following a legal order from the Turkish government — and after it became clear that failing to do so would have led to its services in the country being completely shut down."

"The U.S. app Clubhouse erupted among Chinese social-media users over the weekend," reports Bloomberg, "with thousands joining discussions on contentious subjects...undisturbed by Beijing's censors." On the invite-only, audio-based social app where users host informal conversations, Chinese-speaking communities from around the world gathered to discuss China-Taiwan relations and the prospects of unification, and to share their knowledge and experience of Beijing's crackdown on Muslim Uighurs in the far west region of Xinjiang. Open discussion of such topics is off limits in China, where heavy government censorship is the norm...

On Friday night, a room attracted more than 4,000 people from both sides of the Taiwan Strait to share their stories and views on a range of topics including uniting the two sides. In another room on Saturday, several members of the Uighur ethnic community now living overseas shared their experience of events in Xinjiang, where China has rolled out a widely criticized re-education program that saw an estimated 1 million people or more put into camps...

"Thanks to Clubhouse I have the freedom and the audience to express my opinion," a Finland-based doctor and activist who goes by Halmurat Harri Uyghur told Bloomberg News.
Bloomberg spoke to Michael Norris, a research/strategy manager at a Shanghai-based consultancy, who said most Chinese Clubhouse users he'd spoken to are part of the tech/investment/marketing world. "Those who do engage in political discussion on Clubhouse take on a degree of personal risk," he said. "While most are aware Clubhouse records real names, phone numbers and voice, they are broadly unaware about recent cases in China involving interrogation and jail for errant posts on Twitter." Since Clubhouse so far is only accessible on Apple Inc.'s iPhone and users must have a non-Chinese Apple account, the app has only gained traction among a small cohort of educated citizens, according to Fang Kecheng, a communications professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "I don't think it can really reach the general public in China," he said. "If so, it will surely get blocked."
Reuters highlights the significance of the event: "I don't know how long this environment can last", said one user in a popular Weibo post that was liked over 65,000 times. "But I will definitely remember this moment in Internet history."

"I increasingly suspect that the days of large-scale public distribution of unmoderated user generated content on the Internet may shortly begin drawing to a close in significant ways..." writes long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein.

And then he shares "a bit of history": Back in 1985 when I launched my "Stargate" experiment to broadcast Usenet Netnews over the broadcast television vertical blanking interval of national "Superstation WTBS," I decided that the project would only carry moderated Usenet newsgroups. Even more than 35 years ago, I was concerned about some of the behavior and content already beginning to become common on Usenet... My determination for Stargate to only carry moderated groups triggered cries of "censorship," but I did not feel that responsible moderation equated with censorship — and that is still my view today. And now, all these many years later, it's clear that we've made no real progress in these regards...
But as it stands now, Weinstein believes were probably headed to "a combination of steps taken independently by social media firms and future legislative mandates." [M]y extremely strong preference is that we deal with these issues together as firms, organizations, customers, and users — rather than depend on government actions that, if history is any guide, will likely do enormous negative collateral damage. Time is of the essence.
Weinstein suggests one possibility: that moderation at scale "may follow the model of AI-based first-level filtering, followed by layers of human moderators."

But what's the alternative? Throngs of human moderators? Leaving it all to individual users? Limiting the amount of user-generated content? No moderation whatsoever?

Share your own thoughts and ideas in the comments. How should user-generated content be moderated?

Last week Cory Doctorow shared his own answer for what Apple and Google should've done about Parler: They should remove it, and tell users, "We removed Parler because we think it is a politically odious attempt to foment violence. Our judgment is subjective and may be wielded against others in future. If you don't like our judgment, you shouldn't use our app store."

I'm 100% OK with that: first, because it is honest; and second, because it invites the question, "How do we switch app stores?"
Doctorow warns that "vital sectors of the digital economy became as concentrated as they are due to four decades of shameful, bipartisan neglect of antitrust law."

And now Slashdot reader esm88 notes that "The EFF has made a statement raising concerns over tech giants control over the internet and who gets to decide which speech is allowed" (authored by legal director Corynne McSherry, strategy director Danny O'Brien, and Jillian C. York, EFF director for international freedom of expression): Whatever you think of Parler, these decisions should give you pause. Private companies have strong legal rights under U.S. law to refuse to host or support speech they don't like. But that refusal carries different risks when a group of companies comes together to ensure that forums for speech or speakers are effectively taken offline altogether... Amazon's decision highlights core questions of our time: Who should decide what is acceptable speech, and to what degree should companies at the infrastructure layer play a role in censorship? At EFF, we think the answer is both simple and challenging: wherever possible, users should decide for themselves, and companies at the infrastructure layer should stay well out of it....

The core problem remains: regardless of whether we agree with an individual decision, these decisions overall have not and will not be made democratically and in line with the requirements of transparency and due process. Instead they are made by a handful of individuals, in a handful of companies, the most distanced and least visible to the most Internet users. Whether you agree with those decisions or not, you will not be a part of them, nor be privy to their considerations. And unless we dismantle the increasingly centralized chokepoints in our global digital infrastructure, we can anticipate an escalating political battle between political factions and nation states to seize control of their powers.
On Friday Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of the right-leaning blockchain-based social network Minds (which includes a Slashdot discussion area), posted that in order to remain in the Google Play store, "We had to remove search, discovery, and comments..." We aren't happy and will be working towards something better. What is fascinating is how Signal and Telegram are navigating this and in my opinion they are still there because they are encrypted messengers without much "public" content. Obviously controversial speech is happening there too...

We will be releasing a full report on our plan for fully censorship-resistant infrastructure.
Ottman also advises users downloading apps from Apple's store to "leave if you're smart."

Polish government officials have denounced the deactivation of Donald Trump's social media accounts, and said a draft law being readied in Poland will make it illegal for tech companies to take similar actions there. From a report: "Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not," wrote the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, on Facebook earlier this week, without directly mentioning Trump. "There can be no consent to censorship." Morawiecki indirectly compared social media companies taking decisions to remove accounts with Poland's experience during the communist era. "Censorship of free speech, which is the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is now returning in the form of a new, commercial mechanism to combat those who think differently," he wrote. Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which is ideologically aligned with Trump on many issues, has itself been accused of trying to limit freedom of speech in recent years.

jasonbuechler writes: A North Idaho internet provider, Your T1 WIFI, emailed customers to say customers would need to opt-in to access Facebook and Twitter from its service. They wisely seem to have changed their mind on that after it started garnering attention on social media. The ISP says it decided to restrict service this way after receiving numerous calls from customers concerned about censorship. "They could do this themselves but some do not have the technical knowledge to do so and it would be very tiresome for us to do it for them and it would be expensive to visit each customer that wants this done," the company wrote in an email.

The customers' requests for firewalls preventing access to these sites followed the tech giants' decisions to close down Donald Trump's accounts and suspend his activity. After the decision started attracting attention on social media, the owner of the company said the websites would only be blocked for customers who asked.

KREM.com notes that Your T1 WIFI "may violate Washington state's Net Neutrality law, which states that internet providers may not manipulate access to content."

Alibaba founder Jack Ma's absence from public view in the past two months, including missing the final episode of a TV show on which he was to appear as a judge, has fueled social media speculation over his whereabouts amid a Chinese regulatory clampdown on his sprawling business empire. From a report: China's highest-profile entrepreneur has not appeared in a public setting since a late October forum in Shanghai where he blasted China's regulatory system in a speech that put him on a collision course with officials, resulting in the suspension of a $37 billion IPO of Alibaba's Ant Group fintech arm. The Financial Times reported on Friday that Ma was replaced as a judge in the final episode in November of a game show for entrepreneurs called Africa's Business Heroes.

An Alibaba spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday that the change was due to a scheduling conflict, declining further comment. While news coverage of Ma's absence from public view triggered speculation on Twitter, which is blocked in China, it was not a significant trending topic on social media in mainland China, where sensitive topics are subject to censorship. Chinese regulators have zeroed in on Ma's businesses since his October speech including launching an antitrust probe into Alibaba and ordering Ant to shake up its lending and other consumer finance businesses including the creation of a separate holding company to meet capital requirements.

Since 1976 "Project Censored," a U.S.-based nonprofit media watchdog organization, has been identifying "the news that didn't make the news," the most significant stories it believes are being systematically overlooked. Slashdot ran stories about its annual list of the year's most censored news stories in 1999, 2003, 2004, and in 2007, when they'd presciently warned that the media was ignoring the issue of net neutrality.

But their latest list of underreported stories includes this disturbing headline: "Antibiotic Abuse: Pharmaceutical Profiteering Accelerates Superbugs." Pharmaceutical giants Abbott and Sun Pharma are providing dangerous amounts of antibiotics to unlicensed doctors in India and incentivizing them to overprescribe. In August 2019 the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) reported that these unethical business practices are leading to a rise in superbugs, or bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotic treatment. Bacteria naturally evolve a resistance to antibiotics over time, but the widespread and inappropriate use of antibiotics accelerates this process. Superbugs are killing at least 58,000 babies each year and rendering a growing number of patients untreatable with all available drugs.

India's unlicensed medical practitioners, known as "quack" doctors, are being courted by Abbott and Sun Pharma, billion-dollar companies that do business in more than one hundred countries, including the United States. The incentives these companies provide to quack doctors to sell antibiotics have included free medical equipment, gift cards, televisions, travel, and cash, earning some doctors nearly a quarter of their salary. "Sales representatives would also offer extra pills or money as an incentive to buy more antibiotics, encouraging potentially dangerous overprescription," a Sun Pharma sales representative revealed to an undercover BIJ reporter... [P]atients without access to better care often turn to quack doctors for treatment, and many are unaware that their local medical "professionals" have no formal training and are being bribed to sell unnecessary antibiotics.

In September 2019, the BIJ reported on similar problems with broken healthcare systems, medical corruption, and dangerous superbugs in Cambodia. Their account describes how patients often request antibiotics for common colds, to pour onto wounds, and to feed to animals. Illegally practicing doctors and pharmacists in Cambodia admitted that they would often prescribe based on customer requests rather than appropriate medical guidelines. As the BIJ noted, "This kind of misuse speeds up the creation of drug resistant bacteria, or superbugs, which are predicted to kill 10 million people by 2050 if no action is taken...."

Although superbugs have attracted some attention, their cause and importance remain poorly understood by the public. The Independent and BuzzFlash republished the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's report; otherwise, the role of pharmaceutical companies in the rise of dangerous superbugs has been drastically underreported.
The site's list of the top 25 censored stories of 2019 - 2020 also includes:

• Growing interest in so-called "public" banks, "not legally obligated to maximize profits, as private banks are; instead, public banks are mandated to serve their communities."

• How rising sea levels and warmer waters will impact nuclear power plants, "posing increased risks of nuclear disasters."

• Proposals to revitalize journalism through public funding.

• How the U.S. military represents "a massive, hidden contributor to the climate crisis."

As part of its "Year in Review" series, the EFF shares their dramatic behind-the-scenes details about 2020's fight over the future of .org domains. It begins when the Internet Society (ISOC) announced plans to sell the Public Interest Registry — which manages the .org top-level domain (TLD) — to private equity firm Ethos Capital.

"If you come at the nonprofit sector, you'd best not miss." EFF and other leaders in the NGO community sprung to action, writing a letter to ISOC urging it to stop the sale. What follows was possibly the most dramatic show of solidarity from the nonprofit sector of all time. And we won.

Prior to the announcement, EFF had spent six months voicing our concerns to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) about the 2019 .ORG Registry Agreement, which gave the owner of .ORG new powers to censor nonprofits' websites (the agreement also lifted a longstanding price cap on .ORG registrations and renewals)... Throughout that six-month process of navigating ICANN's labyrinthine decision-making structure, none of us knew that ISOC would soon be selling PIR. With .ORG in the hands of a private equity firm, those fears of censorship and price gouging became a lot more tangible for nonprofits and NGOs. The power to take advantage of .ORG users was being handed to a for-profit company whose primary obligation was to make money for its investors....

More NGOs began to take notice of the .ORG sale and the danger it posed to nonprofits' freedom of expression online. Over 500 organizations and 18,000 individuals had signed our letter by the end of 2019, including big-name organizations like Greenpeace, Consumer Reports, Oxfam, and the YMCA of the USA. At the same time, questions began to emerge (PDF) about whether Ethos Capital could possibly make a profit without some drastic changes in policy for .ORG. By the beginning of 2020, the financial picture had become a lot clearer: Ethos Capital was paying $1.135 billion for .ORG, nearly a third of which was financed by a loan. No matter how well-meaning Ethos was, the pressure to sell "censorship as a service" would align with Ethos' obligation to produce returns for its investors...

Six members of Congress wrote a letter to ICANN in January urging it to scrutinize the sale more carefully. A few days later, EFF, nonprofit advocacy group NTEN, and digital rights groups Fight for the Future and Demand Progress participated in a rally outside of the ICANN headquarters in Los Angeles. Our message was simple: stop the sale and create protections for nonprofits. Before the protest, ICANN staff reached out to the organizers offering to meet with us in person, but on the day of the protest, ICANN canceled on us. That same week, Amnesty International, Access Now, the Sierra Club, and other global NGOs held a press conference at the World Economic Forum to tell world leaders that selling .ORG threatens civil society. All of the noise caught the attention of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who wrote to ICANN (PDF) asking it for key information about its review of the sale...
Click through to read the conclusion...

This week MSNBC published an opinion piece from a researcher on China (who works on internet censorship and freedom of expression issues) from the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

It examines specific exchanges between a China-based Zoom executive and employees at the company's California headquarters (taken from the 47-page complaint filed by America's Justice Department) showing how Zoom disrupted video meetings commemorating the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown: It was a fascinating read, not least because few global tech companies that do business in China have ever made public the details of their communications with Chinese authorities on censorship issues, despite repeated calls to do so from human rights organizations and United Nations experts. What the complaint reveals is Beijing's aggressive pursuit of global censorship of topics deemed sensitive or critical of Beijing, and Zoom's failure to adequately protect its users' rights to free expression and privacy...

Beijing has long leveraged market access to compel foreign tech companies to meet its censorship demands, whether in China or abroad. Apple has removed hundreds of virtual private network (VPN) apps from China's App Store. In 2019, it also removed a mapping app widely used by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong from the App Store. LinkedIn blocked content critical of Chinese authorities for users in China. From the complaint, one can see Zoom's fear that if it didn't terminate meetings or suspend accounts upon request, it risked having its China operation shut down at any time, which loomed large in all of its decisions.

Companies understandably want access to China's huge market, but they also have a responsibility to respect human rights under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Zoom said publicly that it is "dedicated to the free and open exchange of ideas," but when Jin repeatedly framed speech critical of the Chinese government as something that could "do bad things" or "illegal activities," and demanded they be censored, he met no resistance or got any questions from his colleagues at headquarters.
The article also blames Jin for making false claims to a Zoom colleague that a private Tiananmen commemoration meeting was supporting terrorism/inciting violence, after which "the colleague quickly terminated the meeting and suspended the host account without any investigation into the matter."

And it alleges that Jin also forwarded complaints from operatives who'd intentionally joined public meetings with offending content so those meetings could then be reported and shut down, while "a U.S.-based Zoom employee, knowing they were schemes, facilitated it..."

Voat, an "anti-censorship" alternative social network that's been described as the "alt-right Reddit," is scheduled to shut down on December 25th. From a report: Voat co-founder Justin Chastain announced the pending closure this week, saying the site had run out of money after an investor defaulted on their contract in March. "I personally decided to keep Voat up until after the US election of 2020. I've been paying the costs out of pocket but now I'm out of money," Chastain wrote. Voat was founded in 2014 and hosted Reddit-like forums with minimal moderation. It grew rapidly after Reddit added an anti-harassment policy and banned five subreddits that it said violated the rules, including its infamous r/fatpeoplehate forum.

Global internet companies Facebook, Google and Twitter and others have banded together and threatened to leave Pakistan after the South Asian nation granted blanket powers to local regulators to censor digital content. From a report: Earlier this week, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan granted the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority the power to remove and block digital content that pose "harms, intimidates or excites disaffection" toward the government or in other ways hurt the "integrity, security, and defence of Pakistan." Through a group called the Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), the tech firms said that they were "alarmed" by the scope of Pakistan's new law targeting internet firms." In addition to Facebook, Google, and Twitter, AIC represents Apple, Amazon, LinkedIn, SAP, Expedia Group, Yahoo, Airbnb, Grab, Rakuten, Booking.com, Line, and Cloudflare.

If the message sounds familiar, it's because this is not the first time these tech giants have publicly expressed their concerns over the new law, which was proposed by Khan's ministry in February this year. After the Pakistani government made the proposal earlier this year, the group had threatened to leave, a move that made the nation retreat and promise an extensive and broad-based consultation process with civil society and tech companies. That consultation never happened, AIC said in a statement on Thursday, reiterating that its members will be unable to operate in the country with this law in place.

Researchers from the University of Michigan used their own automated censorship tracking system to collect more than 21 billion measurements over 20 months in 221 countries. They discovered that citizens in what are considered the world's freest countries aren't safe from internet censorship. From a press release: [Roya Ensafi, U-M assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the development of the tool, and her team] found that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries studied, including unexpected places like Norway, Japan, Italy, India, Israel and Poland. These countries, the team notes, are rated some of the world's freest by Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy and human rights. They were among nine countries where Censored Planet found significant, previously undetected censorship events between August 2018 and April 2020. They also found previously undetected events in Cameroon, Ecuador and Sudan. While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widespread censorship. However, Ensafi points out that the groundwork for that has been put in place here.

"When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic," she said. "The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope." It's already happening abroad, the researchers found. "What we see from our study is that no country is completely free," said Ram Sundara Raman, U-M doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering and first author of the study. "We're seeing that many countries start with legislation that compels ISPs to block something that's obviously bad like child pornography or pirated content. But once that blocking infrastructure is in place, governments can block any websites they choose, and it's a very opaque process. That's why censorship measurement is crucial, particularly continuous measurements that show trends over time." The study is titled "Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory."