Censorship, Protocol and Control (and Bill Gates)

Bill Gates was recently quoted in a speech given at Stanford University as saying: “I don't see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet. You cannot control the Internet.”

Really Bill? The same article goes on to point out the blatant fallacies, conflicts of interest in that statement: “This seemed rather a curious thing for the Microsoft chief to say, considering that his company (along with Google, Yahoo, and others) has cooperated with China's censorship efforts. The entire Chinese Internet experience, in fact, raises questions about whether Gates' beautiful vision is true to the facts as we know them. Certainly the country is doing a pretty decent job of "controlling the Internet.”

As many of the posters have pointed out below, the internet is not simply the Utopian, boundless freedom that it (through the notion of cyberspace) is often posited as (Even in William Gibson’s version of cyberspace, Case is damage by his former employer in the “real world” for the grievances he carried out in the digital one). Through his discussion of DNS tree structure (one of the two main protocols which he claims make up the internet) Galloway highlights the very concerns which posters have raised below and which have populated much of the contemporary discourse on censorship. As Galloway quotes Tim Berners-Lee, DNS is “the one Achilles heel by which [the Web] can all be brought down or controlled.” This is going on right now, through the internal firewalling of China and the cooperation of American companies.

As Gilles Deleuze claims, “Control societies operate with a third generation of machines, with information technology and computers.” In fact it might even be argued that beyond China trying to “control the internet,” the very nature of the internal is control. Users can be track, personal information can be mined or stolen, “criminals” can be found (Just ask any of the 12 Brown students who were sued by the RIAA for illegal music downloads).

That said Galloway’s work is of the utmost importance because it examines the fundamental structures of the internet. If we live in a control society, it is certainly an utterly complex one, one in which the power for protocol can empower the user with a sense of control while simultaneously enacting structures of control (and perhaps even discipline).