BRUSSELS, 01/11/2012 (INDEX). She has been described as Europe’s “most wired politician” and is one of the few MEPs who really understands the internet. As the rapporteur leading on the European Parliament’s report and proposal that there should be an EU strategy on digital freedom in foreign policy, published earlier this year (and currently being amended by MEPs), Marietje Schaake is blazing a trail in pushing for technology and human rights to be mainstreamed in EU external action.

A member of the Dutch social liberal party D66, Schaake has been a member of the European Parliament since 2009, and sits on the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Board of Governors of the European Internet Foundation. She also serves as vice-chair of the Supervisory Board of Free Press Unlimited, and was last month appointed to lead a report on press and media freedom worldwide, due in early 2013.

Index met Schaake in Brussels to discuss what the European Parliament is doing — and should be doing — to defend online freedoms and how the internet can stay open in an age of multiple threats.

INDEX: What would you say are the greatest threats to digital freedom of expression in Europe today?

MARIETJE SCHAAKE: There are a number of threats. Roughly speaking, governments have a hard time acknowledging and reconciling the empowerment of individuals. The monopoly of power and information that is eroding (…) I think that’s exciting and to some extent being redistributed to individuals. Power structures that were once hierarchical are more horizontal.

This offers great opportunities, but there are governments who, especially when they feel like they’re facing a crisis, want to reclaim control; they want to ban certain functions such as instant messaging or the use of technology in certain areas, such as in the UK after the riots. But I think there’s a lack of understanding that what we do here has an impact on our credibility abroad.

For example, the European legal standard is that technologies needs to have lawful interception and capacity for police and law enforcement. In Europe in principle this is bound by strict rules. But if this technology is used in a different context where there is no rule of law, then it means the technological backdoor is permanently open. In a country such as Iran, mobile and internet communications are intercepted systematically and then used to track and trace dissidents and human rights defenders.

Another trend I see is the increased power of corporations, a lack of democratic oversight and checks and balances of the responsibilities that they take and are sometimes pushed to take in regulating the online environment.

INDEX: With this pushback from corporations, what should the role of democratic governments be to ensure that, while the internet can innovate and advance, fundamental freedoms are not encroached upon?

MS: We should make sure technology is included in human rights laws, making sure that these laws apply in different contexts. The same goes for competition laws or net neutrality laws. Technologies are developing so quickly and policy making is lagging behind; this is partially a result of democracy, the belief that there should be many voices giving input, we see consensus and these things take time. But I do think it’s important that we ensure the application of laws considers the changing environment. This is now mainly fought out in courts.

We have to make sure that we make and adapt policies to be relevant to today’s age. I would say people come first, not corporate interests or technology itself. There is a tendency to focus on the specific technology, for example, we’re still talking about whether downloading from a legal source should be legal or illegal, but world is now streaming — it’s moving on. The world has already moved on.

While technologies develop rapidly, policy making is slow. Therefore putting the rights of the people at the heart of the decisions, policy is more relevant. There is a tendency by the movie and music industry to push for outsourcing of monitoring illegal downloading by internet service providers (ISPs). This would be an undesirable move; we have a separation of powers for a reason. Without appropriate understanding of what this proposal implies, it is difficult to ensure people’s fundamental rights are protected.

INDEX: And net neutrality? What are the threats here to the openness of the internet?

MS: I think net neutrality should be guaranteed. The real risk is a race to the bottom where business models push out certain non-commercial actors, where public value of information and public value of access to it is under-estimated. That information becomes merely a commodity for businesses to make money on, and we don’t appreciate the consequences of that.

Have you heard of the filter bubble? Eli Pariser [co-founder of Avaaz] has written about the impact of search engines but also about filtering information, not only by search engines but also by social media, whereby we try the same term but get different results because search engines know your profile and that, for instance, you prefer information about conservative politics and I prefer information about sports. And that way you could say that people who are always reading right-wing news will perpetually be presented with more similar links. People are seeing more and more of what they already believe, so it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The impact of these algorithms and increased use of search engines has not been investigated very thoroughly yet.

We must also keep the public value of information in mind. If information is systematically ranked differently, and if people are drawn into their own perspectives systematically, structurally and perpetually, what does that mean? We must understand much more how business models may alter the public value of information and how technologies are designed often to optimise profits for shareholders, but are not designed to optimise human rights or democracy. I would like to go back to a place where we focused much more on ensuring fundamental democratic principles of people’s universal human rights and that we continue to test whether new environments actually ensure that sufficiently.

INDEX: How feasible is a model where human rights are protected?

MS: Well, there’s a lot of updating of rules that I do think one of the key things I’m working on is to stop digital arms being exported from the EU to countries where there are known or systematic human rights violations. [Update 01/11: it was announced on 23 October that the European Parliament has endorsed stricter European export controls of digital arms]. It is a disgrace that this is still going on, I think it undermines the EU’s credibility. Everyone in the public that I’ve talked to about this believes it’s outrageous. There is a technology gap; a lot of people are not aware that the technology they’re using for recording and making [content], these are companies whose names we don’t know, they have a consumer base, they sell to third country governments, law enforcement agencies, police. They are a different kind of company than Google or Twitter or Facebook that a lot of people feel a personal relationship to because they use their services. So I think updating export regulations is feasible.

The discussion on net neutrality is becoming more eminent. In the Netherlands we have net neutrality laws, I’m very happy about that. I think there will be a push for more protection of human rights because it will also come from the market, so it won’t only be governments that have to take their primary responsibilities vis a vis the public and corporations, but it will also be a choice for people to seek different products where they feel like their rights are better protected. I am sure there will be more of those being developed, I think we’re in a transition period where people are only beginning to understand the deep impact of technology.

Marietje Schaake. Photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

INDEX: So how do we educate people about security and privacy online while ensuring their freedoms are protected? 

MS: Security and freedom are an integral part of each other in the context of the rule of law. Educating people is really important so they can make better choices and are aware of the big picture. A lot of people now think that services are free, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch — there’s always a revenue to be made. So making people understand how it happens I think is important.

And again, look at context within which technology may be used but at earlier stage. I’m in favour of doing human rights impact assessment at a research and development phase so that before something is widespread and everybody is using it we can actually stop and think and see what kind of impact it might have. People have warned us for years but we see it happening now, that over-the counter commercial security IT software is used against human rights defenders in third world countries. Malware, weaknesses in common systems like Microsoft are used to take over people’s computers. It’s becoming cheaper, more readily available and more widespread, and it turns against the interests of countries they were produced from and exported from. I wish there had been more consideration of the potential impact down the line of these sorts of surveillance technologies. We should learn as we go and realise that what we sell can also be used against us. The political urgency can be increased by understanding that it’s not just happening in a foreign land, that it will have an impact closer to home.

INDEX: In the UK, we’re looking at the draft “Comms Data Bill” [which will effectively create a giant database of every UK citizen’s web and text activities]…

MS: Oh my God.

INDEX: … so how can the UK defend digital freedom while bringing into play something as restrictive or undemocratic as this?

MS: Some people also need to remind the politicians responsible that such restrictive proposals immediately hurt their credibility on the global stage. William Hague gave a huge speech about the importance of freedom and security [at the Budapest Conference on Cyberspace earlier this month]. Okay, fine, but practise what you preach! I really don’t understand whether he [Hague] realises how contradictory his own words are. So, defenders of human rights, digital freedom activists, civil rights organisations, consumer rights organisations etc can come together and start and pushing back against these kinds of excessive measures. It shows how eager governments are to retain control.

INDEX: Is this an area where the European Parliament could provide some pushback?

MS: It will certainly have to be tested against European rules to see whether it is allowed. That would be an area for internal European policies, and my focus is mostly on the rest of the world.

I hope that the UK government and those responsible for these sorts of proposals realise their credibility in the world is directly undermined. When proposals were made to ban instant messaging or to even shut down certain functions [after the UK riots], there were responses from Iran and China saying “need help?” That’s not a joke, the world is really focused on what we do, it’s not only about being credible but about impacts that can backfire.

INDEX: There’s a very strong argument that if the EU — or any Western government body — is to defend digital freedom abroad it has to get its house in order first. What would you say are the first things the EU Parliament can do to achieve that?

MS: There’s a real confusion about key elements of democracy, like separation of powers. You can’t just have private companies engaging in law enforcement tasks. There are core values like the presumption of innocence, and then there are core human rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press. These are all at stake when we look at the way in which, for example, intellectual property rights are being enforced.

I would hope there are lessons that are being drawn in the EU from measures against terrorism which initially were justified on the basis of saying “no one wants the worst of the worst crimes”. The same happens here; no-one wants terrorism or child pornography or cybercrime. The question is does it justify the measures proposed and are these measures proportionate? In law this is a very important concept, proportionality. I think that a lot of the measures proposed are not proportionate. There have to be checks in a court of law instead of at a policy level. What we can do is check against existing EU regulations to see if they are in line or not, but otherwise this should be tested before court.

The internet and technologies have changed a lot, but not people’s universal human rights. We do not need many new laws, nor should we over-regulate the internet. However, human rights and competition laws should apply equally online and offline. Technologies should be integrated and mainstreamed.

But I’d also urge political leaders to be leaders and not take some kind of panicked knee-jerk reactions to things they can’t control. The consequences can be disastrous.

Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index. She tweets at @martaruco

The post INDEX Q&A: Talking to Europe’s most wired politician appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The boom in surveillance technology sales is chilling free speech. We need to wake up to this reality, says Mike Harris

This piece originally appeared on the Independent Blogs

Wide-eyed internet visionaries told us technology would free its users from the iron grip of states, with the internet blind to borders and not respecting the dictats of bureaucrats. Instead technology is making dystopia not just possible, but cheap. Unthinkingly we’re sending our most private data across the internet thinking it a private space. Exploiting this weakness, Western technology companies have spotted a market for surveillance equipment that allows governments to hoover up data — and use it to spy on their citizens. Much of this technology has been exported to authoritarian states, but as we are discovering, if you allow British firms to flout human rights abroad, the rot begins to set in at home.

Gamma Group is run from a non-descript warehouse unit in a commercial park on the edge of Andover. This blandness is a deceit. Gamma sell a product called FinFisher, a piece of software that infects a computer and takes full control of it, allowing Skype calls to be intercepted and every keystroke the user types to be sent across the internet to another computer. The software is so sophisticated human rights groups initially couldn’t even prove it existed.  Now, the University of Toronto Munk School has published research said to show that Bahraini activists have been targeted using FinFisher.

After opening emails with titles like “Torture reports on Nabeel Rajab” (a leading human rights activist now imprisoned) their computers were reportedly infected and their personal data sent to an undisclosed third party. The government of Bahrain denies it was behind the apparent deliberate sabotage. However, opposition activists are now panicked fearing their security has been breached. In response, Gamma Group reportedly said in a 23 July email that it can’t comment on any individual customers and that Gamma complies with the export regulations of the UK, US and Germany. It added that FinFisher is a tool for monitoring criminals and to reduce the risk of abuse of its products the company only sells the product to governments.

Meanwhile in Sweden telecoms giant Teliasonera has, according to a television documentary, sold surveillance equipment to almost the entire roll call of degenerate post-Soviet regimes: Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Belarus. In response to the documentary, a spokeswoman for Teliasonera said that “police tap into information from telecom networks to fight crime” and “the rules for how far their authority goes are different from country to country.” When pressed about complicity in human rights violations, she reportedly declined to comment on why security agencies were being given access to telecom buildings in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

One Teliasonera source told news show Uppdrag Granskning: “The Arab Spring prompted the regimes to tighten their surveillance … There’s no limit to how much wiretapping is done, none at all.” Teliasonera’s equipment gives security services the capacity to monitor everything in real time — from the location of mobile phone users, their calls and SMS messages, to their emails and Facebook messages.

As Irina Bogdanova told Index on Censorship, she believes that surveillance equipment was used to locate her brother, former political prisoner Andrei Sannikov, using the signal from his mobile phone. Sannikov, a presidential candidate in 2010’s rigged elections, was stopped whilst hidden in the back of a vehicle travelling across Minsk. During his trial recordings of his private phone calls were played to the court. In a rigged legal system, the KGB didn’t need to do this, but it was a clear signal to other opposition figures that the state is watching their every move.

I can vouch for the effectiveness of surveillance in distilling fear. I flew into Belarus the day Oleg Bebenin, a human rights activist, was found dead in suspicious circumstances. After making a series of calls to London to tell colleagues I thought Oleg had been murdered, my mobile was cut off whilst I was stood alone in the streets of Minsk. My contacts in Belarus also had their mobile phones disconnected.

The British government has the powers under the Export Control Act 2002 to stop the export of any equipment that can be used to breach human rights, but with many surveillance products it has seemingly chosen not to do so. The situation is so grave that Privacy International is preparing to take the government to court to force it to take action. Yet, it isn’t just the use of this technology abroad which is of concern. The debate is moving much closer to home.

In Britain, the government is proposing legislation (the Communications Data Bill) that will grant the Home Secretary the power to blanket retain data on every citizen for an undefined purpose. It won’t require judicial approval — but potentially every text message, every Facebook message, every phone call, every email from everyone in Britain would be stored on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government. If the Bill passes, companies will have to collect data they don’t currently collect and the Home Secretary will be able to ask manufacturers of communications equipment to install hardware such as ‘black boxes’ on their products to make spying easier. This proposed scale of state surveillance will add the UK to the ranks of countries such as Kazakhstan, China and Iran. This total population monitoring would break the fundamental principle that a judge and court order is required before the state invades the privacy of its citizens by holding their personal data.

Five years ago the mobile phone you carried in your pocket could pin-point you in an urban area with a margin of error of approximately 50 metres; on the latest phones it’s around 2.5 metres. Yet, we still haven’t woken up to the possibility of technology enabling states to monitor individuals on a scale unimaginable to even the wildest of science fiction writers just a generation ago. This surveillance is being used right now in authoritarian regimes to silence opposition, as the market for this technology grows with little interference from Western governments, it will become cheaper. Once it becomes almost priceless for Western governments to monitor all our data, the arguments for allowing private communication could become drowned out by the desire for public order and safety. Then the chill on free speech will be complete.

Mike Harris is head of advocacy at Index. He tweets at @cllr_mikeharris

The post Communications Data Bill: Technology is making dystopia not just possible, but cheap appeared first on Index on Censorship.

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Below is an excerpt of the book, in which Hogge interviews Ethan Zuckerman, long-time fellow and researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and co-founder of international blogging community Global Voices Online.

“The reason I think internet freedom is interesting and potentially useful,” Ethan explains, “Is not because I believe some sort of Marxist-Leninist revolution is round the corner based on IT. If anything, I think a sort of an Anglo-American revolution might be long around the corner.”

For a moment, I have no idea what he is talking about. Ethan smiles at me. “I mean when we broke free of your shackles, through the long arduous public debate process of trying to figure out what a better government would be than the lousy one we had.” I realise he’s talking about the 18th century. I feel slightly embarrassed, but Ethan lets it go with a wave of his hand.

Ethan is worried that the virtual places we’re creating online to foster such a debate are not what they seem. “That forces us to think about how we create public spaces. [With the web] we think we have a free and open space to communicate in. Well maybe we don’t. Because it is owned and controlled, and because of that it’s possible that certain types of speech actually get very difficult.”

When the WELL went online, the internet was very much a network of ends, and for that reason people believed that the ‘net, and later the web, had a radical potential to refresh public discourse. No longer would debate be led by media oligopolies brokering access to a one-way pipe. The consolidation of media, epitomized by Rupert Murdoch’s News International empire, could not happen over this network. Or so went the theory.

In fact today, according to a company called Arbor Networks who have access to a significant majority of the world’s internet traffic, about 60% of all web traffic terminates at about 150 companies, and about 30% of all web traffic terminates at about 30 companies. 6% of web traffic is the result of just one company: Google. Consolidation in cyberspace has already happened, and in a remarkably shorter time frame than the consolidation of print and broadcast media. Just like our local high street, a once-thriving marketplace of independent ventures is being taken over by familiar and deodorised corporate giants – Facebook, Yahoo!, Amazon, YouTube. How has this happened?

“The rhetoric of the internet early on was this massively decentralised network where every point routes to every point,” Ethan explains. “It doesn’t matter if you cut the wires, it will re-route
around it and everything is sort of an independent end node, right? Technically things are fairly independent as end nodes. You can do ludicrous things with just a PC attached to this network. And the whole rise of peer-to-peer [filesharing] demonstrates how ludicrous you can be just doing peers.

“The first thing to note is that it’s nowhere near as resilient as we promised ourselves it was. You know, when a cable goes down in west Africa it has very real, very significant consequences. But what turns out to be most interesting, at least for me, is that we thought all the services would be at the edge of the networks. Which is to say lots of people would have their own web servers under their control, their own mail servers under their control. And what’s been happening gradually over about 15 years is everyone has said, ‘that’s really a pain in the ass and I really don’t want to do that.’”

Much like the sixties communards who gave up farming the land after one season showed them how hard it was, communicatory self-sufficiency turned out to be a bit of a drag. “I think it changed first because of spam,” Ethan says. “Basically, if you run your own mail server these days the amount of time you have to spend training your spam filter is just insane. And so I would say 80% of the sort of hardcore geeks I know just moved over to Gmail, and have just sort of said, ‘It’s fine. You know? Yes, now Google controls my email. If I really am worried about it I can always encrypt on top of it, but the pain I’m going through to maintain my own mail server just isn’t worth it anymore’.” Ethan and I both use Gmail.

“After that,” Ethan continues, “we started to see consolidation of web hosting. And similarly that’s more of a cost issue. Web traffic is really spikey. And what you really want to do is to be able to turn up the bandwidth to your server. Or potentially put another server in if you’re having a good day and suddenly everyone’s paying attention to you. That’s really hard to do if you’re off on your own running your own box. So a lot of people have moved to using hosted web services. Those web services tend to converge and so you end up with companies like Rackspace which now control large percentages of the independent web.

“Where this has really gotten crazy is in social media. Social media is almost by definition heavily centralised.” Ethan says the reason for this is “it’s a namespace problem”, which is a short and rather technical way of saying that we need directories like Facebook and Twitter to make it easy for us to find our friends online among the sea of people who share their names. Just as the Screen Actors Guild and Equity stipulate that no two of their members may have the same stage name to avoid confusion, Facebook and Twitter make sure no two of their users have the same handle or identifying code, meaning you can always find the exact Ethan Zuckerman or Becky Hogge you’re looking for.

What all this means is that although the rhetoric behind the ‘net was one of radical decentralisation, disintermediation and the chance at a truly plural public sphere, the reality of it pens us into what are essentially a handful of corporate pseudo-public spaces.

“It’s terrifying,” says Ethan. “And the reason it’s terrifying is that much of the thinking that we’ve done about the internet is thinking about open standards, autonomous agents, all able to make our own decisions. But if you are using a social media platform or a blogging platform to publish your thoughts, you are within one of these large spaces. At a certain point, you are dependent on their rules of the road for your continued existence.”

Ethan found himself thinking about this problem for the first time when friends of his in Zimbabwe, a human rights organisation called Kubatana, were told by their hosting provider Bluehost, one of the largest in the US, that they had to go. When Kubatana asked Bluehost why, the response was simple but shocking: ”because you’re Zimbabwean.”

What had happened was this. The US Department of Trade maintains a list of sanctioned individuals in Zimbabwe with whom US companies are prevented from doing business, and the penalties for violating those sanctions had been slowly ratcheting up over the last few years. At some point Bluehost’s lawyers had apparently decided that, legal niceties aside, it probably wasn’t worth their while serving any Zimbabweans. The edict had gone out “Get rid of the Zimbabweans. They’re not worth it.”

“So what happened,” Ethan recounts, “was well after Kubatana had signed up to their account, Bluehost changed their terms of service.” Most ‘net companies reserve the right to change their terms of service at any time, often without notifying the users who unwittingly agree to abide by them. “Their new terms of service state, ‘I am not a Zimbabwean’ or Syrian or Cuban or any number of other countries. And so my friends were being kicked out for being Zimbabwean. Now, if you’re a human rights activist in Zimbabwe, this is a pretty easy fight as far as they go. So they decided to start a fight. They got the US Embassy in Harare to call the Treasury Department and have the Treasury Department call this company and say, ‘You idiots, fix this’. And so three weeks later after much nasty email exchanges there was an apology from the CEO inviting them back.” At which point, according to Ethan, they said what they had intended to say all along, namely, “Go fuck yourself.” They now host with Verio.

The Open Net Initiative published a report in 2010 detailing the practices of five major social networking and blogging platforms - Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Blogger – and the effects these practices were having on free speech. Based on these investigations, the report speculated that Facebook was using a crude, numbers-based system for policing its content, automatically deactivating accounts and group pages if a threshold of complaints was met. It also identified specific Facebook groups who were gaming this system, for example a group of Arab Muslims whose stated aim was to get the account of every atheist Arab deleted by Facebook’s automated system. Although YouTube was found to offer better avenues of redress to users who felt their content had been removed unfairly, ONI discovered anecdotal evidence to show that it too set the threshold of permitted speech far higher than one might expect of, say, serious broadcasting.
YouTube had deleted a number of human rights videos – mostly from the Arab world – on the basis of the violence and illegal activity they depicted, rather than the context in which those depictions were being communicated. Flickr too, had come up against human rights activists - this time in Romania – angry at content removed from their streams.

The ONI are not anti-capitalists. They make clear in the introduction to their report that they understand that corporations who provide services like YouTube and Facebook are working under competing pressures: the pressure to create a viable business, to keep their services available in countries with restrictive laws, and the pressure to avoid politically-motivated cyber-attacks on their infrastructure from groups keen to suppress ideas through force. ”Negotiating this terrain often means compromising,” they write, ”sometimes at the expense of users”.
Nonetheless, the ONI also rightly identify the current state of affairs as deeply precarious. Because the platforms they investigated are beginning to dominate online communications, the efforts these platform operators make to police their own content will have a substantial and growing impact on free expression and public discourse:

As users flock toward popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, they are effectively stepping away from public streets and parks and into the spaces similar in some ways to
shopping malls – spaces that are privately owned and often subject to stringent rules and lacking in freedoms.

As Ethan puts it, “it’s sort of like saying, ‘let’s go have a good public argument about this. And we’ll do it at Terminal 5 at Heathrow’. If what’s interesting about internet freedom is this idea of creating digital public spaces where we can debate whatever issues are relevant. And if what’s exciting about internet freedom is that countries that don’t have conventional public spaces could now have digital public spaces, then we have to recognise, those aren’t public spaces. Those are private spaces; those are corporate-controlled spaces.”

In No Logo, Naomi Klein details exactly what’s wrong with the real-world emergence of the pseudo-public space in corporate America:

“The conflation of shopping and entertainment found at the superstores and theme-park malls has created a vast grey area of pseudo-public private space. Politicians, police, social workers and even religious leaders all recognize that malls have become the modern town square. But unlike the old town squares, which were and still are sites for community discussion, protests and political rallies, the only type of speech that is welcome here is marketing and other consumer patter. Peaceful protestors are routinely thrown out by mall security guards for interfering with shopping, and even picket lines are illegal inside these enclosures.”

It’s ironic that a technology that gave citizens the ability to take back public space and public discourse from corporate control could have turned so quickly into the anti-globalisation movement’s worst nightmare – a virtual corporate beast a hundred times more efficient than anything in the real world at exploiting the citizen-consumer’s own expression and desire in order to sell advertising. Why did things pan out so differently from the way early geeks expected them to?

“This was such an anti-corporate space when a lot of people were starting to play with it for the first time,” says Ethan. “If your first internet experience was the WELL, you might have asked, ‘Who the hell’s going to make money off a bunch of Grateful Dead fans?’ My first experience was Usenet. And the notion that someone was somehow going to make money off that cesspool seemed utterly ludicrous. Back then, I’d always assumed that when we were promising investors that we’d do good things with their money that, you know, we were probably going to lose money hand over fist. So it’s never made any sense to me.”

Ethan is thinking back to his Tripod.com days, before the big sale to Lycos. “In the nineties, we were these scrappy little youngsters in a house in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with no affiliations to big companies. And the companies that were big, and that we admired, had silly names like Yahoo! and their founders rode around on skateboards. So it was hard to think of this as the big corporate consolidation. It looked like the internet was this space where anyone could do anything with very few resources and a very low start-up cost. And in fact that does seem to continue to sort of be true. You know, Twitter was able to become Twitter pretty damn fast. So I think maybe it is still a pretty open space. In that, if you can create a platform and convince
people that they want to be on it you are free to do that. But I think it is a space that naturally consolidates. And I think it consolidates because of brand.”

So much for No Logo. Ethan explains, “When geography no longer matters, brand matters a lot more. I remember people saying in 1998, ’I want to be the number one retailer in the online pet and pet food space.’ It turns out that there is no online pet and pet foods space. There’s an online retail space, Amazon is number one at it. Being number two at it isn’t very helpful. But I think that was hard to call. And I think it was hard to call, because the myth of the garage entrepreneur doesn’t seem like it is about centralisation.”

Though we started with water, Ethan and I have moved on to beer, and I’m feeling a little bold. What, I ask him, does this tell us about us? After all, evil forces are not at play here. The internet actually resisted regulatory interference from the old order in quite an amazing way, at least in its early years. Were we always unlikely to match up to the net’s potential?
Ethan takes a sip of his drink and thinks. “We’re sitting near the heart of a city of, how many million people?”

I tell him ten, although I’m none too sure.

“That’s a lot of people…” he says.

“That is a lot of people,” I reply.

“And they’ve decided to get together in a fairly close environment. The real estate here, the permission to use this piece of land we’re sitting on, it’s a whole lot more expensive than in some other parts of this country. Human beings like being together. And we have this natural tendency to get together. In fact we’re watching this happen across the world right now. We’re urbanising and we’re urbanising very quickly because when people get together there’s more opportunity, there’s more excitement. You know there’s just more, the closer you get together. I think centralisation is in the human spirit. And I think what’s interesting is this. You know the reason why London doesn’t have one giant Sainsbury’s? It’s geography. We couldn’t all get to it. And if we could, we couldn’t all get through it, right? You know, we’d all end up fighting over the iceberg lettuce and you’d never get to the rocket. And there’d be a big, big problem. The internet lets us all go to  Sainsbury’s at the same time, and we can all get our lettuce at the same time. And at a certain point the question then becomes, well why not just have one Sainsbury’s?”

Like Frontline’s founder, Vaughan Smith, neither Ethan nor I live in a city. He lives in rural Massachusetts with his wife and son, a three-hour drive out of Boston. I live in an area of Cambridgeshire that produces a significant proportion of the vegetables Sainsbury’s stocks on its shelves. But we’re the exception, not the rule. In global terms, we’re ludicrously wealthy – in the top 1%. We’re running off to rural areas because we believe that when we get there, we’ll be free. Perhaps for the same reason, we both fell prey to the excitement of decentralisation promised by the ‘net.

“We’re Utopians,” Ethan says.

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Chaired by Jo Glanville, Editor, Index on Censorship

The speakers are:
Richard Allan, Director of Policy EU, Facebook
Anthony House, European Policy and Communications Manager, Google
Gus Hosein, Policy Director, Privacy International

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