Internet access in a time of democratized online publishing may be understood as a contemporary form of the right to self-expression. It could also be understood as part of basic access to public services in an increasingly online world. We do wonder what such a designation would mean for pricing policies and the internet economy.

Legal theory trailblazer Corey Doctorow wrote the following bold prediction in an article about homeless people and internet access last week:

Here's a prediction: in five years, a UN convention will enshrine network access as a human right (preemptive strike against naysayers: "Human rights" aren't only water, food and shelter, they include such "nonessentials" as free speech, education, and privacy). In ten years, we won't understand how anyone thought it wasn't a human right.

What do you think? Do you think internet access should be understood as a fundamental human right? Do you think that it's a frivolous distraction at a time when millions of people still don't have access to food, clean water and shelter?

France is a nation that decided earlier this year to give its citizens free one year subscriptions to a newspaper of choice on their 18th birthdays. Ostensibly to bail out the newspaper industry but also to foster a life-long habit of learning. That's pretty neat.

If you're interested in more details about this particular French ruling and can read French, check out our partner blog ReadWriteWeb France. If English is a requirement, Techdirt will no doubt have solid coverage of this and related issues.

Image: "PC bang", Seoul. By Flickr user tawalker

Indians around the internet are condemning the ruling as a blow against freedom of speech and democracy. It certainly appears to be a dangerous misunderstanding of the nature of the internet on the part of the court and a bad precedent in the most populous democracy in the world.

We're not sure what the number of potential readers has to do with anything and we find it pretty frightening that a court that would say "you're a computer student so you know how many people use the internet" had any say at all in such matters.

According to reports the comments in question were left by anonymous users and the group's owner claimed they were legitimate exercises of free speech. The youth arm of the political party facing criticism apparently filed suit under a law pertaining to "hurting public sentiment."

There are more than 1,000 groups on Orkut that show up in a search for "Shiv Sena," some for and some very much against the party. We're writing based on relatively light local reporting, so it's possible that the group started by Ajith D was particularly heinous. On principle, though, we presume that the young man should not face legal charges for anonymous comments left by others - no matter what those comments were.

Late last year Facebook shut down a group on that site that appeared to be celebrating acts of genocide against Bosnian Muslims. People lost their Facebook accounts and the group was closed due to violation of the site's Terms of Service against advocating violence - but filing legal charges against the group's admin would have been an entirely different matter.

India's Supreme Court ruling that the Orkut group owner could be sued for anonymous comments sounds like a terrible ruling to us and the kind of thing that web users all around the world should be concerned about. India is the world's second most populous country and its largest democracy. It's a large and complicated country, though. While the recent rise of the Indian middle class and tech sectors have received substantial attention, the country still has one of the highest child malnutrition rates in the world - twice that of Sub Saharan Africa according to the World Bank.

Democracies are complicated; the United States has one of the highest rates of imprisonment of any industrialized countries in the world, holds a shockingly disproportionate number of its young black men in prison and was founded on an experiment in ethnic cleansing. Who has the moral high ground?

While big picture questions are important, this particular case is as well. Will Google intervene in defense of Ajith D's use of its website? Will the US government, now more than ever advocating the use of free-flowing information technology to advance human well being, have anything to say about this potentially terrible precedent being set? We suspect neither will occur.

It's a good idea for us as individual web users to remember that even as new internet technology sets so much information and so many voices free, even in a celebrated democracy - online freedom may be one repressive legal ruling away from being put at serious risk. No matter where you might live - do you trust that your local judiciary would understand the issues in a case like this? We don't.

Will this be of any consequence? We like former CNN journalist turned human rights campaigning blogger Rebecca MacKinnon's take on it: maybe.

What kinds of things have these companies done that are being frowned up?

• "In April 2004, the Chinese journalist Shi Tao used his Yahoo! email account to send a message to a U.S.-based pro-democracy website. In his email, he summarized a government order directing media organizations in China to downplay the upcoming 15th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy activists. Police arrested him in November 2004, charging him with 'illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities.' Authorities used email account holder information supplied by Yahoo! to convict Shi Tao in April 2005 and sentence him to 10 years in prison." - Amnesty International


• Google censors images and other information in China when the government deems the content unacceptable.
  
  Image from Search Engine Watch


• YouTube shut down, then reinstated but erased, an Egyptian activist's YouTube account filled with videos documenting police brutality. It appears that after some time YouTube has since reposted the man's videos after continued international pressure.
  

Is This Going to Change?

These are a few examples of the kinds of issues the new Global Network Initiative will likely engage with. Will the Initiative have any teeth? We're skeptical, this isn't the first time these companies have promised to do better by their users. It's hard because their fundamental drive is to monetize these huge markets. We have a lot of respect for Rebecca MacKinnon's take on it, which we excerpt at length below.

Organizations like Human Rights Watch, Human Rights in China, Human Rights First, and the Committee to Protect Journalists would not be putting their reputations behind this thing if they didn't think it was meaningful.

That said, the initiative must prove its value in the next couple of years by implementing a meaningful and sufficiently tough process by which companies' adherence to the principles will be evaluated and benchmarked. If there is a rigorous process that rates the companies' behavior, then investors who care about social responsibility, and users who want to know how trustworthy a given company is compared to others, can make more informed choices.

The initiative is based on the reality that there is pretty much no country on earth - including the United States - where governments aren't pressuring telecoms and Internet companies to do things that potentially violate users' rights to privacy and free expression. Companies must consider the right to free expression and privacy of users in all markets to be part and parcel of what it means to be socially responsible. Part of the problem is that many telecoms and Internet companies just have not been thinking through
these issues as they roll out products and services around the globe, resulting in all kinds of unintended consequences - the TOM-Skype fiasco in which Skype's Chinese business partner was found to have allowed a huge security breach being the latest example. The Initiative is about getting companies to think ahead and incorporate human rights assessments into new product plans or plans to enter new markets. It's also about being more transparent and honest with your users about what's being censored, why and how, and informing them about how and with whom their personal data is being stored and shared. That way, users can make informed choices about how and when it is safe or reliable to use these services - or not.

The detentions follow a wave of arrests of Chinese dissidents leading up to the Olympics. The US government pledged as the games began to engage the Chinese government concerning human rights - we wonder what those conversations look like now that China has detained journalists consistently critical of US policy as well.

New online media have opened the doors to people publishing on budgets that would never have supported journalistic efforts in the past. That new generation of publishers has a greater freedom to take risks because they aren't as beholden to the interests of sponsors. That's one way to describe the political impact on journalism of blogging - another way might be that these new media have opened up publishing to activists with less interest in objectivity than traditional journalists have aimed for.

Either way, the impact of blogging and video blogging on the world at large is widely recognized and it's no surprise that the authoritarian Chinese government is taking steps to protect itself. We condemn the detention of any journalists, whether they strive for objectivity or tell stories from a particular perspective.

According to extensive coverage on BoingBoing, the following US journalists and/or activists are all currently missing:
- James Powderly
- Brian Conley
- Jeffrey Rae
- Jeff Goldin
- Michael Liss
- Tom Grant

We're working on creating a widget displaying video, information and a button to call US Congressional representatives but for now we'll leave you with the following video published by Conley in China last week. Update: Ribbit.com doesn't want to give us an account promptly, so we'll just say - if you want to call the US Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee to register your concern about the 5 people above, they are at +1 202 225 5021 and they are waiting for you. We just called them a few minutes ago.

Many people say that Twitter is frivolous and unimportant. In this case those people would be correct. Just six weeks ago the US Supreme Court rejected Exxon's appeal to drop a lawsuit alleging that its employees in Indonesia "committed murder, torture, sexual assault .. genocide and crimes against humanity" in defense of one of the world's largest liquid natural gas facilities. Placed in this context, whether or how this company deals with Twitter seems irrelevant.

The conversation about how Exxon should have or will deal with the spoofed Twitter account can be followed via a post last night on analyst Jeremiah Owyang's blog. It makes sense to tackle the general questions concerning "big brands" and new media, but a line should be drawn somewhere in order to keep technology in a larger perspective. The case of Exxon Mobil is on the other side of that line.

The Context in Indonesia

Indonesia is a sprawling country of more than 220 million people and an amazing 17,000 islands. It possesses huge amounts of liquid natural gas and gold and has major geo-political significance.

The country has a long and troubled history of international and internal conflicts but the US government's own documents detail US payment of local groups killing subversives based on US provided lists of individuals in the 1960's and US State Department acceptance of Indonesian government massacres of civilians using US supplied weapons in the 1970's.

Key player and Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger retained financial interests in the country's natural resources throughout the 1980's, the human rights abuses alleged to have been committed by Indonesian soldiers working as Exxon employees were far from the only crimes alleged to have been committed in the 1990's (see in addition the Dili Massacre, for example) and since the turn of the 21st century multiple US administrations have sent elite US military training groups to "train the trainers" in Indonesia despite US Congressional bans against direct co-operation with the Indonesian military on the basis of documented human rights abuses.

It's not a pretty picture. There's an intense history of globe-dominating nations doing horrible things to the people of Indonesia.

The Current Lawsuit

On June 16th, 2008 the US Supreme Court denied a request by Exxon Mobil to dismiss a lawsuit titled Exxon Mobil v. John Doe, 07-81, brought by international rights groups on behalf of 11 villagers in Indonesia's Aceh province. The suit alleges that Indonesian soldiers hired by Exxon Mobil "committed murder, torture, sexual assault .. genocide and crimes against humanity."

One British rights organization specializing in Indonesia, called Down To Earth, further reports that "the company has been accused of providing the military with buildings used for torturing local people suspected of involvement in the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and excavators to dig mass graves for the victims of military violence." The worst accounts of the treatment of civilians in Indonesia are something no one wants to read.

Exxon argued to the Supreme Court that the lawsuit against it should be dismissed because it involves issues of international relations that should be left to the Executive Branch. In 2002 the US State Department said that "adjudication of this lawsuit at this time would in fact risk a potentially serious adverse impact on significant interests of the United States..." Indonesia is a country heavily populated with Muslims and the US argued that a ruling on the Exxon lawsuit could harm anti-terrorist efforts, among other concerns.

Since that time various courts have shaped the debate such that now-resigned Solicitor General Paul Clement said this May that the case had been sufficiently narrowed to avoid harm to the nation's foreign policy interests. According to the Associated Press, the Bush administration urged the US Supreme Court to reject Exxon's request to drop the case this June.

Thus the lawsuit still stands and Exxon may, years later, have to answer to some allegations of human rights violations.

And what about Twitter? There may or may not be a time when Exxon's engagement with new social media is important, but this same summer when the Supreme Court has just said they will be judged is not that time.

New Media and International Human Rights

In October we wrote here about the last active bloggers in Burma, fighting to let the world know what was happening there as the military massacred monks and turned the country inside-out. In December we wrote about YouTube's deleting videos documenting torture of civilians by Egyptian police because of the site's policy against violent imagery. On the Fourth of July we wrote about the Iranian Parliament's consideration of the death penalty for subversive bloggers.

The internet and human rights intersect often. If we are to believe that these democratizing media are going to make the world a better place, then it's important to keep them in context regarding what's going on in the world outside of our tech niche. It's with that in mind that we point at the lawsuit and Supreme Court ruling against Exxon when the company's communication strategy with the world comes up in conversation.

After all, as Exxon Spokesperson Alan Jeffers said yesterday about Twitter: "It's our perception that social networking is based on honesty, transparency and trust..."

Photo: A market in Aceh, Indonesia. Creative Commons from Flickr user A. www.viajar24h.com