Arguing that censorship is a "virus" affecting the health of the Internet, Amnesty International UK yesterday sponsored a conference called "Some People Think the Internet Is a Bad Thing: The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace." Unless something is done, and soon, Amnesty warns that the Internet "could change beyond all recognition."

The conference, which featured Jimmy Wales, Richard Stallman, and recently-jailed US blogger Josh Wolf, highlighted the growing issue of government-mandated filtering, which is now conducted by 25 countries. Azerbaijan, Burma, India, South Korea, and Thailand all made the list; a complete, worldwide Internet filtering map is also available from the OpenNet Initiative. For those who missed the conference, an archived webcast is available.

"The virus of Internet repression is spreading," said Tim Hancock, Amnesty UK's campaigns director. "The 'Chinese model'—of an Internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy—is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers."

Amnesty reserves particular criticism for the firms—often American—that go along with censorship or actively contribute to it. The group has attacked Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google especially for their dealings in China, where all three countries have been involved in censorship or turned over pro-democracy e-mails to the Chinese government.

Not all bad

But even Amnesty admits that not all censorship is bad, making the entire debate more murky. For instance, European countries often censor "hate speech" or anything that appears designed to incite racial hatred—something that Amnesty supports. British historian David Irving was jailed in Austria in early 2006 over remarks he made doubting the extent of the Holocaust; his defenders decried the decision in the same terms that anti-censorship groups now use to talk about the Internet. Academic Deborah Lipstadt told the BBC at the time, "I am not happy when censorship wins, and I don't believe in winning battles via censorship... The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and with truth."

The US generally does not attempt to impose such limits on speech, even when it is racially hateful, but it does have laws against child pornography and even libel (both of which apply to the Internet as well as to the offline world). Internet regulation is not a binary option—a country either has it or it doesn't. Instead, it's a continuum of practices, with heavy-handed state-run filtering and censorship (China, for instance) on one end and hands-off regulation that uses the court system to handle only certain online crimes (the US system).

Countries don't tend to be terribly consistent on all of this, either. The US, for instance, allows fascist organizations to set up web sites, use the swastika, and incite all the hate they want so long as they don't do anything violent, but it bans online gambling and has arrested several UK executives who run gambling web sites. And this happens despite the widespread presence of offline casinos. By no means does this complexity indicate that we simply throw up our hands and say that everything is relative, but the issue is more complicated than "censorship is bad."

Should multinational corporations be forced to make moral decisions about censorship every time they enter a new market? The companies tend to say no and argue that even the limited services they are able to provide are more helpful than no services at all. Their accusers argue that the "we're just following local laws" defense is becoming the equivalent of the "just following orders" defense that has been used to justify some of the most heinous crimes on the planet.