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The irony of US Net freedom

By Philip J. Cunningham
China Daily, March 1, 2011

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has assumed the role of an Internet evangelist on behalf of US President Barack Obama and a handful of big corporations. Although the WikiLeaks case found the US government awkwardly on the "wrong" side of Internet freedom, she has tried to downplay the obvious hypocrisy of her stance - in short, anything that serves Unite States government interests is enlightened Internet policy - while portraying her political team and its corporate allies as model global citizens on the road to human rights and freedom, never mind the bloody war raging on in the background.

It used to be thought that what was good for General Motors (GM) was good for America. GM, because of the decline of US manufacturing, is a shell of its former self, but Google has emerged as a national mascot, the new pet poodle of American high-tech evangelists. The US promotion of Internet freedom cannot be taken at face value, especially after the frantic efforts made to block and discredit WikiLeaks.

Instead, US official rhetoric about Internet freedom is rather code for "do it our way", which itself can be parsed to mean: "Do as we say, not as we do."

In fact, Clinton's latest lecture to the world conflates the idea of Internet freedom with advertising freedom. Her speech is like the start gun in a global race for advertising revenue in which the US has a leg up and has taken an early lead.

What really counts for crony capitalists, inside the Beltway and out, is not so much the freedom of speech but the freedom to advertise, which promotes slavish materialism and ultimately an irresponsible, apolitical way of life. Making the world safe for Facebook, Google, and Yahoo means granting them the freedom to collect and analyze more of your private data in order to boost their ad revenue.

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