On the Proposed Censorship of the Internet

An essay which examines the attempts of government to violate the fundamental civil liberties and freedoms of democratic societies. Also, an attempt to prove that Censorship of the Internet is neither necessary nor constitutional, and the fact that it would be completely impossible. Written by Michael Smith.

  The answer to all of these questions is, of course, "No". In a democratic country such as Canada, censorship is neither necessary nor constitutional.

  The most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet, must be protected from any government attempt to censor it. Granted, pedophiles and pornographers do use the Internet as proponents of censorship have undoubtedly pointed out. To tell the truth, though, they also use telephones and mail. No one argues that these forms of communication should be censored. The same protection that people have when they make a speech about their half-baked ideas in public should be given to people who make that same speech on the Internet. The protection of free speech is meant to protect such controversial, offensive speech, as orthodox speech is never challenged. This is democracy. Those who suggest that unorthodoxy is the equivalent of Nineteen Eighty-Four's "thoughcrime" are themselves the equivalent of a mass of authoritarian undemocratic Inner Party members of Oceania.

  But the undemocratic authoritarians forget one unquestionable fact: the censorship of the Internet would literally be impossible. The RAND Corporation designed the Internet as a decentralized command-and-control-and-communications system, one that would be less vulnerable to a nuclear attack during the Cold War. If censorship is attempted, the Internet would merely interpret it as damage, and then route around it. Hence the strength of the Internet is revealed: it is not censorable. Because it cannot be adequately controlled, it is not governable. We must teach children to live in an uncensorable world, not to what extent we can fail when we try to do the impossible. And why waste time and money when these resources could be spent on something more productive?

  In any democratic society, Canada for example, censorship is unnecessary and undesirable. In addition, the proposed limitation of freedom of speech by the government is a proposed violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights. Such an attempt at the limitation would not only be undemocratic, but futile as well. Censorship should not be used in Canada because the very nature of any attempt to restrict our fundamental democratic freedom of speech in any way whatsoever is clearly not democratic. And the basic rights of adults should not be compromised for the sake of the few children who could be using the Internet unsupervised: this is a ridiculous approach to the problem by those who have assumed that parents no longer have any responsibility for their children, and the government must regulate the system to the point that the basic democratic rights of citizens are infringed upon.

  Quite simply, then, censorship should not be used in a democratic society because it is not democratic. It is, in fact, tyrannic. Censorship is merely an excuse for certain individuals within the government to encroach upon our democratic freedoms, and to impose their own standards or tastes upon the citizens they supposedly represent. Censorship is a tool of tyranny. For that reason alone, it should not be permitted. Consider the following statement by Barry Goldwater: "Extremism in defence of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue."      

  In the words of Newt Gingrich, "censorship is clearly a violation of the right of adults to communicate with each other. It is a very badly thought out and not productive argument". Gingrich was referring specifically to the American Communications Decency Act. Nevertheless, in Canada or in any other democracy, we cannot allow the government to withdraw the rights of a minority because the majority finds their practices or opinions to be unacceptable. Would the attempt to do so be democratic? Regardless of the fact that it would ultimately fail, the attempt to impose restrictions on the creative anarchy of the Internet could still kill the spirit of cooperative knowledge sharing that has made the Internet so invaluable to millions of people around the world.  

"Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects"

This quote appears in the United States Federal Court Report on the introduction of the Communications Decency Act by Senator Exon.

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