“The Internet,” Ira Magaziner opined in a 1998 speech,
is “a force for the promotion of democracy” as well as “individual freedom and
individual empowerment.” At the time he gave this speech, Magaziner was the
Clinton administration’s internet guru. He began his remarks in a tentative
register, observing that “humility is an important quality for anyone working
to develop policies for the Internet,” given the “uncharted” nature of the
terrain. A minute or so later, Magaziner informed his audience that the
internet would “be the primary driver of the broader economy for the next
couple of decades,” make dictatorships and other non-democratic forms of
government “impossible in the long run,” and “bring all the peoples of the
world closer together.”
At least, the internet would deliver these revolutionary
benefits if policymakers regulated it appropriately. And that, Magaziner
explained, meant regulating it as little as possible: pursuing a “market-driven
model” in which “the government role is not in regulating, but rather in
setting the terms for a predictable legal environment for contracts to form.” A
“regulated model” would stifle the growth of the medium and cause “distortion.”
Nation-states, accordingly, should abandon most efforts to tax the internet, to
subject it to traditional telecommunications and competition laws, or to censor
or control content. (Intellectual property in electronic commerce, on the other
hand, would require “strong protection.”) “If I could wave a magic wand,”
Magaziner summed up his message, “I would say we should go through a complete
deregulation here, and let the market go.”
Thus was launched the United States’ “internet freedom”
agenda. Its precise elements have shifted some over time, but as Jack Goldsmith
explains in a riveting new essay on The Failure of Internet Freedom,* it has consistently been anchored in the principles of (as
Goldsmith puts it) “commercial non-regulation” and “anti-censorship.” This
agenda has been a boon for the commercial development of the internet,
particularly for the large U.S. firms that dominate life online.
Yet in virtually every other respect, Goldsmith argues, the
agenda has been an abject failure. Authoritarian regimes—most notably China,
but also states in the Caucasus, the Arabian Peninsula, and beyond—“have become
adept at clamping down on unwelcome speech and at hindering the free flow of
data across and within their borders.” European regulators have become
increasingly aggressive in going after U.S. technology companies and in
repudiating U.S. notions of privacy and free expression. Edward Snowden’s leaks
exposed the hypocrisy of the U.S. government’s “hands-off” approach to digital
networks. And years of lax regulation have contributed to a domestic online
environment saturated with falsehoods, conspiracy theories, troll armies,
cyberthefts, cyberattacks, and related ills—an environment that Russian
president Vladimir Putin “was able to exploit,” in Goldsmith’s telling, “to
cause unprecedented disruption in [American] democratic processes, possibly
denying [Hillary Clinton] the presidency.” As with other aspects of U.S.
economic and social policy, President Trump inherits, and is himself the political product of, a baneful legacy of neoliberalism
with regard to managing the internet.
* * *
Why did the internet freedom agenda fail? Goldsmith’s essay
tees up, but does not fully explore, a range of explanatory hypotheses. The
most straightforward have to do with unrealistic expectations and unintended
consequences. The idea that a minimally regulated internet would usher in an
era of global peace, prosperity, and mutual understanding, Goldsmith tells us,
was always a fantasy. As a project of democracy and human rights promotion, the
internet freedom agenda was premised on a wildly overoptimistic view about the
capacity of information flows, on their own, to empower oppressed groups and
effect social change. Embracing this market-utopian view led the United States
to underinvest in cybersecurity, social media oversight, and any number of
other regulatory tools. In suggesting this interpretation of where U.S.
policymakers and their civil society partners went wrong, Goldsmith’s essay
complements recent critiques of the neoliberal strains in the broader human rights
and transparency
movements.
Perhaps, however, the internet freedom agenda has faltered
not because it was so naïve and unrealistic, but because it was so effective at achieving its realist
goals. The seeds of this alternative account can be found in Goldsmith’s
concession that the commercial non-regulation principle helped companies like
Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon grab “huge market share globally.” The
internet became an increasingly valuable cash cow for U.S. firms and an
increasingly potent instrument of U.S. soft power over the past two decades;
foreign governments, in due course, felt compelled to fight back. If the
internet freedom agenda is understood as fundamentally a national economic
project, rather than an international political or moral crusade, then we might
say that its remarkable early success created the conditions for its eventual
failure.
Goldsmith’s essay also points to a third set of possible
explanations for the collapse of the internet freedom agenda, involving its
internal contradictions. Magaziner’s notion of a completely deregulated
marketplace, if taken seriously, is incoherent.
As Goldsmith and Tim Wu have discussed elsewhere,
it takes quite a bit of regulation for any market, including markets related to
the internet, to exist and to work. And indeed, even as Magaziner proposed
“complete deregulation” of the internet, he simultaneously called for new legal
protections against computer fraud and copyright infringement, which were soon
followed by extensive U.S. efforts to penetrate foreign networks and to
militarize cyberspace. Such internal dissonance was bound to invite charges of
opportunism, and to render the American agenda unstable.
Developments outside of government only heightened the
contradictions. As private platforms increasingly came to function as the new governors of online speech, the non-commercial regulation principle
and the anti-censorship principle came into increasing tension with each other.
Magaziner envisioned the state as the source of all undesirable restrictions on
and distortions of online speech. Yet many of the ways in which digital content
is controlled today are the product of corporate decisions, not government
policies. And in some instances, public regulation may be the most effective
means to combat the
speech-restrictive or speech-distortive effects of those decisions. As Nani
Jansen Reventlow and Jonathan McCully observe,
by “seeking to take a ‘hands-off’ approach when it comes to regulating these
platforms, the internet freedom agenda . . . jeopardizes the anti-censorship
principle.”
* * *
Whatever the causes—and there are likely multiple, overlapping
contributing factors—it is hard to gainsay Goldsmith’s descriptive claim that
the U.S. internet freedom agenda now finds itself derailed and discredited
around the globe. The fact that the U.S. internet freedom agenda is failing,
however, does not necessarily mean that the larger project of internet freedom
is failing. On the contrary, the growing detachment of this project from
American commercial and ideological interests may suggest a new path forward.
This is the glass-half-full perspective offered by Jansen
Reventlow and McCully and by David Kaye in their responses to Goldsmith. While
endorsing Goldsmith’s basic critique of U.S. policy, these leading
international lawyers push back against the parochialism inherent in evaluating
internet freedom in U.S.-centric terms. “If we reorient the internet freedom
analysis away from U.S. supply or geopolitical struggle,” Kaye submits,
we will find a wide variety of actors—from the U.N. Human Rights Council
(UNHRC) to regional courts to grassroots activists—who are mobilizing to meet
the global demand for online access, privacy, and security and thereby “laying
the groundwork for resistance to authoritarian policies and laws.” Jansen
Reventlow and McCully likewise praise
such developments, identifying the UNHRC’s “comprehensive, human rights-based
approach” as an especially promising and legitimate alternative to the
hegemonic projection of U.S. power.
As compared to the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations’
vision of internet governance, the vision that seems to be emerging from this
global movement is less deferential to market logic and more concerned with
people’s capacity to control their own data—more concerned, that is, with the
positive liberty to use the internet constructively and autonomously than with
the negative liberty to be spared state interference. Participants in this
movement see themselves as the true defenders of internet freedom and the
United States as its false or fickle friend. And so, twenty years in the
future, we may find that reforms taken in the name of internet freedom bear
little resemblance to the ideas Magaziner set forth in 1998. Humility counsels
that we be open to the possibility.