TWITTER'S RECENT ANNOUNCEMENT that the social network will allow country-specific censorship aroused fury on and off the Internet. Under the new policy, Twitter will place a gray bar over tweets deemed inappropriate for popular consumption by local governmental authorities. Commentators, protesters, and “Tweetavists” expressed their outrage. Blackout protests were proposed in response, and activists warned of the potential of unreported massacres in Syria. Since then, however, the company has made clear that it will only censor tweets when it receives specific and valid requests to do so. But worry remains, and rightfully so: Will the once staid social networking giant, and others like it, condone online censorship in the future?

That is the fundamental question posed by Rebecca MacKinnon in her well-researched exploration of the forces driving Internet policy today. MacKinnon offers a persuasive history of recent global protest movements, and her book serves as a primer on the role that Internet technology and by extension digital networks have played in those efforts. She offers a framework for concerned citizens to understand complex power dynamics among governments, corporations, and citizens of cyberspace. But this fine book comes up short when it turns prescriptive.

“Net freedom” means different things to different people, but on the global stage the Internet freedom movement is fundamentally linked to efforts to hold governments, corporate actors, and digital networks accountable to “Netizens,” while preserving freedom of speech and expression online. “It is time,” MacKinnon says, “to stop arguing whether the Internet empowers individuals and societies, and address the more fundamental and urgent question of how technology should be structured and governed to support the rights and liberties of all the world’s Internet users.”

A great part of Consent of the Networked is concerned with disruptions to the free flow of information on the Internet by specific governments, and MacKinnon succeeds at isolating what she defines as critical moments of abuse in China and the Middle East. While heavy on individual narratives of jailed dissidents and tales of governments hacking activists’ social media accounts, MacKinnon’s book ultimately underscores a reality that citizens seeking accountable government anywhere in the world need to understand. As she observes, “Though the technology used for coordinating and organizing may be politically neutral, the context in which it is deployed is rarely so. Governments everywhere—whether they do business in the home government of companies or in the host government of markets—are demanding that Internet and telecommunications companies take sides, or at least stand back and avert their eyes while the government does what it needs to do, leaving the user or customer none the wiser.”

A discussion of Internet censorship is not complete without an explanation of the sizable role that individual companies’ policies have in policing content on digital networks, and MacKinnon rightfully takes up the role of corporate censorship. She brilliantly dissects specific companies’ policies, explores their recent high profile legal battles (she offers a particularly compelling account of Yahoo’s legal blunders in China), and reveals the extent of their complicity with governments that censor the Internet. And it is here that MacKinnon’s intended definition of “consent of the networked” actually reveals itself. “The Internet is a human creation...” she writes, “power struggles are an inevitable feature of human society. Democracy is about constraining power and holding it accountable. The Internet can be a powerful tool in the hands of citizens seeking to hold governments and corporations to account—but only if we keep the Internet itself open and free.”