In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the key technology behind the internet, discusses internet freedom:

Cerf has watched the internet evolve from a military tool to a globe-spanning means of communication, used by a quarter of the world’s population. But the medium, with its borderless nature, is now running into strong resistance in parts of the world.

”You’re seeing different reactions in different countries. I’m curious if their reactions are the consequences of never having experienced this kind of openness before, or whether it is a political threat that drives the position.”

The borderless quality to the internet is not an accident, Cerf says. When developing the technology in the 1970s, he and his colleagues deliberately did not include anything in the addressing structure to do with countries or borders. From a technical point of view, the only thing that counts about sending information over a network is which networks are linked together.

But Google is arguably suffering a backlash, with its policy of largely unfiltered content under attack in China and in Europe. While the high-profile standoff with China is due to reach a close soon, last month an Italian court ruled that Google executives were guilty of privacy violations arising from a user-generated video showing abuse of an autistic boy, posted on Google Video in 2006. Google says that to comply with Italian law, internet search companies would have to vet every piece of user content material before it is indexed – an impossible task.

”Most of the information there isn’t our information; it’s other people’s and our job is to make it easier to find. But there is no quality control on the content.”

Like Cerf, many worry that once the filtering infrastructure is in place the scope of the restrictions will expand, and legitimate communication will be slowed.

And he argues that countries may be hurting their own economic opportunities by introducing such restrictions. ”You start to wonder, will this mean innovative companies (don’t) come to Australia because they’re concerned about this restraint?”

Cerf says that from a democratic point of view, such restrictions ”feel dangerously constraining”.

In Australia’s case, he says it would be better if ”filtering occurred at the edge of the net under the control of users rather than in the net under the control of government”.

Read the rest of the article here.  It is sad to think that in the near future, Australia may be one of the countries that filters the internet this way.  Not only would this be a concerning indictment of Australian democracy, it also has the potential,as Cerf identifies, to reduce international investment in our country.