We stand for a single Internet...

Reading the transcript of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's talk on Internet Freedom is rather uplifting: "We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas".

"This freedom is no longer defined solely by whether citizens can go into the town square and criticize their government without fear of retribution. Blogs, emails, social networks, and text messages have opened up new forums for exchanging ideas, and created new targets for censorship."

"The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully cooperate. Once you’re on the internet, you don’t need to be a tycoon or a rock star to have a huge impact on society." In short, you can get whuffie-rich online.

These words echo (and amplify) the strong words of Justice Stevens in Reno v. ACLU: "Any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox." Web 2.0 have since become the new forums of choice. This information is able to travel quickly, and viral posts and videos make their way quickly around the globe. Or so they should.

But freedom of speech is endangered, because free communication is sometimes stopped when traveling through borders: "Some countries have erected electronic barriers that prevent their people from accessing portions of the world’s networks. They’ve expunged words, names, and phrases from search engine results. They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in non-violent political speech."

However, "all societies recognize that free expression has its limits."

"Those who use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities. But these challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the internet for peaceful political purposes."

Does the last phrase refer to current debate over three-strikes laws such as the French Hadopi law and the UK Digital Economy Bill? Probably not, as the phrase would then have stopped after "internet." The Secretary of State is referring to people using the Internet to share their ideas which are not necessarily the ones of their government.

So governements should not have the power to cut the pipelines to censure peaceful political speech. We are still not sure whether they may use that power to cast a broad net in order to catch users downloading protected works.