The Internet Is not (Fully) Open, nor Should It Be

[Commentary] To listen to the debate about Internet governance, the world faces a Manichean choice between an open Internet -- where everyone is free to share any information they wish -- and a closed one, where governments block and prohibit vast troves of information. Given this stark choice, the only sensible side to take is openness. After all, as ITIF has shown, global information flows are critical not only to commerce but to the general flourishing of the knowledge economy and democracy. But as in all other aspects of society, we don’t actually face such a binary choice. Reality is far more nuanced.

The Internet is not completely open, nor should it be. As a case in point, the world should welcome the recent announcement by major Internet firms including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, which are taking steps to block images of child sexual abuse. In this particular case, leading Internet companies are using a database of digital fingerprints compiled by the Internet Watch Foundation to identify known child sex abuse images and block their distribution. Clearly, society should want as little as possible to be blocked or taken off the Internet, but that does not mean that we should oppose attempts to block online materials that are clearly illegal.

In short, almost 25 years since the National Science Foundation turned over management of the Internet to the private sector, it’s time for a more reasonable and pragmatic discussion about the Internet, one that moves away from Manichean notions of open-versus-closed. We must recognize that while a key factor in making the Internet one of the greatest technological innovations in human history is in fact its open and permission-free system, that openness and permission-free quality is not unlimited -- and recognizing and accepting this does not make someone into an Internet totalitarian.