The Internet is becoming less free — more and more so. Freedom House’s annual “Freedom on the Net” report found that in 2021 the rights of Web users declined for the 11th year in a row. The primary threats may seem contradictory, but they’re intertwined: a lack of regulation that enables abuse by powerful technology companies and too-aggressive regulation that is abusive itself.
Freedom House documented the most dramatic drops in online liberty in Myanmar, Belarus and Uganda. All three of these countries experienced electoral and constitutional crises to which incumbents responded by cutting off connectivity, demanding data and inundating the information space with propagandistic misinformation. Elsewhere, authoritarianism has covered itself with the fig leaf of supposedly lawful regulation. India, Turkey, Indonesia and Russia all crafted rules requiring the removal of certain content under the rationale of preserving public safety; anti-censorship legislation in Mexico, Brazil and Russia enables authorities to stop companies from enforcing their own policies against dangerous content. Data localization requirements — which mandate that data be stored and processed in the country where it originates — are brewing in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the United Arab Emirates. They can function as an excuse for surveillance.
The United States faces the opposite problem. The country’s “laissez-faire approach" to the tech industry, write the report’s authors, has enabled a ripe environment for data exploitation, disinformation and other malfeasance. By doing next to nothing, the federal government leaves the door open for companies to take advantage of consumers — or for bad actors to take advantage of consumers while the companies themselves do next to nothing. The risk of doing too much is also present here, however: See Texas, where a new law already facing legal challenge seeks to stop social media sites from removing posts or disciplining users based on “viewpoint.” A similar stricture in Florida was blocked by a judge this summer.
The same tension haunts efforts in the European Union and elsewhere to protect against the harms of a Wild West of a Web. The E.U.’s Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, both introduced this year, address content moderation and competition, respectively. Those drafts come with fewer pitfalls than online safety salvos by Britain and Australia, where vague definitions and impossible timelines could encroach on legitimate expression. The Pact Act in the United States, which focuses on transparency requirements for platforms, is also promising — but still legislators must be mindful of negative repercussions.
The Freedom House report is a lesson repeated every year to countries truly committed to preserving the best of the Internet. They must tread carefully, but the worst option is not to move at all — because staying still allows autocracies to lead the way. The call to action should sound especially loud to the United States, which under President Biden has recommitted itself to championing democracy and liberty worldwide. That means championing it online, too.
