Excerpt from a transcription of an interview with Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu about their new book, "Who Controls the Internet?"
Wu: Yes. I think it's a very mixed situation. I think there's a lot more information out there that hasn't necessarily threatened governments' control or governments' control over theirselves. Particularly if you look at countries like Singapore and China, and particularly if you spend time there, there's this weird sensation, as I said, of everything feeling normal but for some reason there's something missing and it's called criticism of government. You can look for it, but you have to look kind of hard. If you're just leading a normal kind of life, you just won't run into it. In fact you'll run into much more of what's really propaganda -- people talking about how great the state is, how great the government is. And with there being more total information, there's also a lot more information and a lot more boosting of the state. There is a greater volume of information but also the mix the government wants of criticism vs. state boosterism. I think it's that ratio between how much support for the state vs. criticism which is really essential, as opposed to just some forbidden content getting through.
Gross: Let's look at attempts by the US government to assert its authority over the internet. For example, the government requested that Google hand over its search data base so the government could see who was going to certain porn sites. So it could enforce the "Child Online Protection Act." Would you talk a little bit about this case and how it was resolved?
Wu: Search engines are an important target for government control because almost everything goes through a search engine. And for the most part, the US hasn't exercised that much control. But the Google case showed the potential for it. That case itself was a request that Google turn over a huge amount of search records that it keeps, records of what everybody has searched for as long as Google's been around. They asked, I believe, for a million such records. They wanted to find out how often people were actually looking for pornography as opposed to other things. But the point of the case wasn't that relevant to the subject of the case. What was relevant that it suddenly became obvious to people that government has the power to get from companies like Google, companies like Yahoo, everything that you've ever looked for in your life. For most Americans, I think, there's a lot of potentially embarrassing things that they've looked for at one point in their life or another, whether an illness or some strange obsession. And so this case made it suddenly a lot more obvious to Americans that government has the power over the internet that other countries have been more obviously exercising.
Gross: Google fought the government's request. Then the judge reduced the request to only 50,000 web addresses.
Wu: Right. And so I think what you learn from this case... there's a couple of things: first of all, the interesting thing is that Google is storing all this information in the first place which is a surprise to many people -- that everything you've ever searched for in Google is in a database in a computer somewhere. But the other point more relevant to our book is that this shows to people that whether it's a million or 50,000, it's the law that's making this decision. Maybe that's not a surprise to lawyers. But I think it's a surprise to people who sort of thought that their search results went off into a little box somewhere never to come back. They're there if government really wants to look at them. People also speculate that other parts of the government which did not announce their activities openly have also been looking at search results -- or other parts of government like the NSA which aren't required to tell the public or anyone what they're doing have also been looking at things people search for.
The full interview is available at The Scribe.
