As governments across the world increasingly seek to extend their reach to control what is said and seen online, the idea of governments actively censoring the Web has become normalized. While free speech advocates once condemned government intrusion into online communications, those same organizations and activists are increasingly cheering the idea of governments constraining digital speech in order to prevent speech they themselves disagree with. Emboldened by this growing support, governments are increasingly looking beyond their own borders to censor speech globally. As these trends collide, the inevitable result will be a fragmented Web.
In the beginning of the modern Web, its decentralized nature meant there were no global rules on what could be said or seen within its digital borders. Each country developed its own locally enforced rules reflecting its distinct cultural and political necessities.
In turn, the rise of social media created centralized walled gardens that transcended geographic borders and led the to the rise of parallel digital states momentarily unbeholden to physical governments.
This brief era of internet freedom meant Silicon Valley could forcibly export American ideals of free speech to the world, giving voice to those living under repressive regimes and autocratic democracies.
Predictably, this brief moment did not last as governments moved swiftly to silence nascent dissent and prevent the freedoms of this new digital medium from interfering with their control over the informational landscape.
The early decentralized era of the Web meant that the repressions of one government had no impact on the speech of another. In the centralized Web of social media, all speech worldwide suddenly had to be acceptable to every other government.
The centralized platforms that once forced free speech upon the governments of the world now found themselves on a race to the bottom to ensure that the speech of every individual worldwide was acceptable to every government worldwide.
In short, rather than bringing free speech to the world, social media stripped those freedoms away from the places they were formerly sacrosanct, ushering in their place censorship and repression.
Despite these downward pressures there have still been international norms and legal understandings that have to date constrained governments from enforcing their speech restrictions on other countries.
Increasingly, however, it is the world’s democracies that are leading the way towards the idea that any government anywhere should have the right to enforce its censorship on the citizens of other countries.
In the EU’s view, any EU lawmaker should have the right to silence criticism of their official governmental actions globally, preventing even American citizens from raising questions about their governance.
If the EU succeeds in these efforts, it will be only a matter of time before the Chinese and Russian governments demand similar concessions.
As more and more governments demand their own right to censor global speech, these censorship demands will become mutually exclusive. Given their global presence, social media companies will come under pressure to enforce irreconcilable legal orders.
Centralized social platforms cannot exist in a world in which one government can leverage a platform’s existence within its borders to force it to censor speech within the borders of another sovereign nation.
The end result of this trend will necessarily be the fragmentation of the Web itself, with social platforms forced to return to the early decentralized days of the Web in which each government could set only the terms for its own citizenry.
This could be achieved through the breakup of social platforms into country-specific platforms that utilize a shared set of protocols and informational exchanges, much like the TCP and HTTP underpinnings of the Web itself. This would prevent governments from having the legal leverage to force global bans, since each franchise would legally exist only within their own borders.
Alternatively, social platforms could attempt to create a similar arrangement through technical means, in which each country would have a specific set of unique censorship rules that control what its citizens see and say without impacting any other. This would replace the current practice of global rules. However, this would be unlikely to satisfy increasing calls from governments for the right to censor speech globally.
Putting this all together, the growing calls for global censorship will increasingly force an international reckoning over sovereignty in the digital age. The most likely outcome is that free speech will give way to the demands of governments, reminding us that for all its once-promised power to transcend geography, even the Web is still based on physical servers residing on sovereign soil.
In the end, the casualty will be free speech.
