As an Internet Lawyer I am often involved in helping to define the scope of online "free speech". We have been following the attacks on free speech in Iran, the new law that has just passed in Kazakhstan and the efforts ongoing in China to curtail and further control online speech. Are we so provincial in the United States to think that all because we controlled the web in its early days, we are still the epicenter of web commerce and technology, and we passed the first laws to govern the Internet - that our fundamental belief system should be exported and willingly embraced by the rest of the world?
This will be one of the biggest challenges for the governance of the web...who will write the rules by which all play? Can we really expect a country to live up (or down?) to whatever standards we as Americans embrace? And if so, should there be an expectation, then, that those countries should be able to impose their own moral high ground on us in the US? This is an issue that is beginning to come to prominence. The debate about how to govern a world in which everyone might ideally play by the same rules is just beginning.
If we in the US would never allow a country to impose its own unique, seemingly healthy, but clearly objectionable rules on us, why should we expect other countries to do so?
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