When repressive governments in some parts of the world deemed it necessary to impose Internet censorship, they made use of such righteous rationale as ‘protecting against evil’ or ‘shielding the people from harmful content.’ But we all know those reasons were just a ruse, to put it lightly. Case in point: the Great Firewall of China. In Iran and North Korea, as well, their governments have Internet censors in place — and we know those are countries with authoritarian regimes.
Last January in the U.S., I attended a series of conferences and meetings where the main topic was Internet freedom, and where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a policy speech on America’s stand on this basic right. Together with me were bloggers and journalists from China, Iran, Lebanon, and from them I learned first-hand how censorship — no matter how seemingly noble the apparent objective — is counterproductive and anti-development.
Yesterday, the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), which is mandated to regulate digital networks in the Philippines, declared that it is requiring ISPs (as well as down-line providers of Internet connectivity) to monitor, deter, and report on child pornography occurring on the Internet. This directive is by virtue of RA 9775, which seeks to prosecute crimes of child pornography in the Philippines. By and in itself, this Republic Act is deserving of the people’s wholehearted support. Congress should be lauded for passing such a law.
However, the means by which this administration hopes to implement RA 9775 — by sanctioning State-sponsored censorship — do not inspire confidence at all. There are technical as well as moral considerations here.
It would cost an arm and a leg to implement the NTC directive. ISPs would have to spend huge sums of money and man-hours to install software that will monitor the millions of websites that Filipinos visit each day. And you can expect that the telcos and their distributors will pass on the cost burden to us, the consumers. The investment won’t only be in the software required by NTC, but also in the acquisition of larger bandwidth pipes to accommodate the expected gigantic load that running the software will definitely entail. That is, if the ISPs are so inclined.
Otherwise, we would suffer considerable Internet access slowdown, if not intermittent down times. You see, the NTC directive states that ISPs must run the monitoring and censoring of websites 24/7. Meaning, each website that you access will have to pass through the censor before you are able to view or interact with it. Imagine the overload! Let’s say one web page is 100kb, and the average number of pages accessed per day is 100; then let’s consider a sample population of 100,000 people. That’s a total of 1 million kilobytes or 1 gigabyte — and that’s a very conservative estimate.
If ISPs do not upgrade their infrastructure in order to accommodate the expected overload, they will most probably have to sort to heavy caching of websites. Simply put, what this means is, if you access Inquirer.net today, the news you read next week will probably be the same as today’s!
Now, the moral issues. Censorship is an evil. It curtails freedom of expression and it is repressive. Enough said.
What about privacy? Yes, there are also privacy issues at stake here. The NTC, in the draft of its implementing guidelines, has stated that it will require logging of what it considers illegal access (which is also resource intensive, by the way). And by logging, does this mean that personal information is to be included? Hmmm… that smacks of China’s Green Dam initiative, doesn’t it?
Think about this. How come First World countries do not impose censorship? They certainly have the resources. I hope that you, and those in our government, will take the time to read Hillary Clinton’s Internet freedom speech. You’ll see why the Americans, the British, the French (whose government also nearly tried to put Internet censors in place) respect freedom of the people.
We should be vigilant. We should not allow our rights and freedom to be trampled upon. That’s not to say that we allow pornography to run rampant. My point is, this band-aid reaction by the NTC is rubbish. It won’t solve — not even by a long shot — the problem of child pornography on the Internet. If our government is sincere in addressing this social blight, they would do well to go to the root of it and not resort to superficial measures that will prove harmful to freedom.
(Now, just to be clear, I’d like to qualify what I mean by “freedom” here: our God-given liberty of self-determination.)
