We can't circumvent our way around censorship

Ethan Zuckerman is one of a number of very smart people who have been working at Harvard for several years on the issue of net censorship.  He has written a terrific article at World Changing this week pointing out that rhetorical calls from politicians to keep the Net free have to be backed up with a deep understanding of the complexities involved and real commitment and deployment of resources to address the problem.

"I strongly believe that we need strong, anonymized and useable censorship circumvention tools. But I also believe that we need lots more than censorship circumvention tools, and I fear that both funders and technologists may overfocus on this one particular aspect of internet freedom at the expense of other avenues. I wonder whether we’re looking closely enough at the fundamental limitations of circumvention as a strategy and asking ourselves what we’re hoping internet freedom will do for users in closed societies.
So here’s a provocation: We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship.
I don’t mean that internet censorship circumvention systems don’t work. They do – our research tested several popular circumvention tools in censored nations and discovered that most can retrieve blocked content from behind the Chinese firewall or a similar system. (There are problems with privacy, data leakage, the rendering of certain types of content, and particularly with usability and performance, but the systems can circumvent censorship.) What I mean is this – we couldn’t afford to scale today’s existing circumvention tools to “liberate” all of China’s internet users even if they all wanted to be liberated...

In short:
- Internet circumvention is hard. It’s expensive. It can make it easier for people to send spam and steal identities.
- Circumventing censorship through proxies just gives people access to international content – it doesn’t address domestic censorship, which likely affects the majority of people’s internet behavior.
- Circumventing censorship doesn’t offer a defense against DDoS or other attacks that target a publisher...

- We need to continue supporting circumvention efforts, at least in the short term. But we need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that we can “solve” censorship through circumvention. We should support circumvention until we find better technical and policy solutions to censorship, not because we can tear down the Great Firewall by spending more.
- If we want more people using circumvention tools, we need to find ways to make them fiscally sustainable...
- As we continue to fund circumvention, we need to address usage of these tools to send spam, commit fraud and steal personal data. … but we’ve got to find a solution that protects networks against abuse while maintaining the possibility of anonymity, a difficult balancing act.
- We need to shift our thinking from helping users in closed societies access blocked content to helping publishers reach all audiences...
- let’s find ways to challenge companies to build blocking resistance into their platforms and to consider internet freedom to be a central part of their business mission...
- The US government should treat internet filtering – and more aggressive hacking and DDoS attacks – as a barrier to trade. The US should strongly pressure governments in open societies like Australia and France to resist the temptation to restrict internet access, as their behavior helps China and Iran make the case that their censorship is in line with international norms. And we need to fix US treasury regulations make it difficult and legally ambiguous for companies like Microsoft and projects like SourceForge to operate in closed societies. If we believe in Internet Freedom, a first step needs to be rethinking these policies so they don’t hurt ordinary internet users.
The danger in heeding Secretary Clinton’s call is that we increase our speed, marching in the wrong direction. As we embrace the goal of Internet Freedom, now is the time to ask what we’re hoping to accomplish and to shape our strategy accordingly."

In the light of the web blocking amendment to the UK digital economies bill let me just repeat some of Zuckerman's suggestions:

continue to fund circumvention...

challenge companies to build blocking resistance into their platforms...

pressure governments in open societies...to resist the temptation to restrict internet access...

pressure governments in open societies...to resist the temptation to restrict internet access...

pressure governments in open societies...to resist the temptation to restrict internet access...

pressure governments in open societies...to resist the temptation to restrict internet access...