Do you have a favorite coffee shop or dressmaker in your neighborhood? Now you can do a lot more than simply rave about your favorite local business to a friend: microloan giant, Kiva, is bringing crowdfunding to U.S. businesses. Normally reserved for struggling, developing-world entrepreneurs, Kiva is piloting a new project, called Zip, to allow small business owners to solicit micro-investments from their neighbors.

“This is a very big deal,” said President Bill Clinton, announcing the Zip pilot project in his hometown of Little Rock, Ark. “We have gotten ourselves in a situation now where the only people who can get real money are the people who don’t need to borrow it.”

Mass online investing has been an entrepreneurial dream for years, but political hangups at the Securities and Exchange Commission have delayed progress on so-called “crowdfunding”. To this day, there are still regulations about the number of investors a business can have and their minimum personal wealth.

Zip cleverly skirts regulation: “Kiva is a nonprofit and makes no money from the loans we facilitate, instead we depend upon optional donations,” explains co-founder Premal Shah. “Kiva lenders make no money from the money they lend, they only expect the money they put in as a loan to be paid back. Because of this model Kiva’s crowdfunding platform falls outside of SEC rules.”

Lending money, regardless of regulation, so Kiva requires that small businesses have the confidence of a “Trustee,” on organizations or individuals who vouch for the credibility of the borrowers. Trustees function like any other noteworthy investor in a startup, but in a more public way that permits the masses to invest confidently without an elite network of established investors.

To give microlending some viral flare, “When borrowers successfully repay their loan, they too can become Trustees and endorse other small business owners in their community.” Ideally, success begets more success, facilitating a cascade of local consumption and investing.

Zip caters especially to local businesses with a social good edge. At Old Skool Cafe, at-risk youth serve piping hot Java, to give them a better future outside the prison system. Mandela Foods Cooperative specializes in cooking up healthy desserts.

Loans start out as low as $25. You can check out Kiva’s pilot project here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Microsoft is talking with Dell about financing its buyout. The deal is reported to be worth about $2 billion.

For the past few weeks there have been reports that Dell has been in talks with Silver Lake Partners, a private equity firm, to buy out the public shareholders. It has been reported that the buyout would be $13 to $14 per share. CNBC broke the Microsoft news this morning.

The big question has been about who would be able to actually manage such a buyout. Silver Lake has been shopping around to banks, pension funds and others, but this is the first report of an actual investor coming forward.

But why is Microsoft interested? It may come down to its play in the hardware market with the Microsoft Surface, and, as the Wall Street Journal reported today, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer says they need a diverse group of companies making personal computers that are powered by Microsoft software.

My question is about the success Dell is having in making the transition to becoming an enterprise solutions company. With being a public company comes the pressure of needing to satisfy shareholders. That means milking the cash as much as possible from the traditional business groups. New efforts, like around developing a cloud strategy, become less important even though critical to the future of the company.

Going private would mean that Dell could focus its attention where it believes it has the most potential for growth. That could give its enterprise strategy more strength.

On the flip side, these buyouts can be brutal, often seeing the company stripped down and then built back up.

Inevitably, you have to ask about Michael Dell and whether he will stay with the company. I am not so sure. He seemed to enjoy having President Bill Clinton on stage at Dell World. Perhaps his future is in politics. The idea does not seem so far fetched, really.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s the dawn of a new day here at CES 2013 in Las Vegas, and just like clockwork there’s yet another keynote address that’s set to kick off in just a few minutes. Today’s headliner is none other than Samsung president Stephen Woo, and rumor has it that there’s quite a bit of star power lined up for today’s event. Panasonic may have had Lisa Ling, but Samsung is expected to bring former President Bill Clinton onstage in short order.

Anyway, myself and Canadian wunderkind Darrell Etherington are here in the crowd to liveblog it all — it won’t be long before things officially kick off, so stay tuned!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

IPO lawsuits to be combined and heard in NY – Dozens of lawsuits against Facebook, the NASDAQ exchange and IPO underwriters will be combined and heard by a federal judge in New York. Federal judges on Thursday ordered that the IPO-related cases be transferred to Manhattan. Some plaintiffs wanted to keep their cases in California, but Facebook requested the transfer, Reuters reports.

Facebook global communications VP to step down - Facebook Vice President of Global Communications Joe Lockhart is leaving the company after 15 months, AllThingsD reports. Lockhart previously served as communications secretary for President Bill Clinton and consulted for Microsoft, Verizon and Pfizer, among others. Lockhart is likely to continue in a consulting role for Facebook, but he wanted to stay on the East Coast rather than relocate to Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

Facebook redesigns Help Center – Facebook launched a redesigned Help Center this week with a focus on new features, privacy and other topics personalized based on how individuals use the site. For example, users not logged into Facebook might see information about how to create an account or tips on resetting their password. The site also highlights frequently asked questions and Facebook Pages users can Like to get tips and feature announcements.

U.K. considers Facebook login for public services – The U.K. Cabinet Office may use Facebook as part of its Identity Assurance program to help people sign into online public services without the need for an ID card, according to ZDNet. Social media banking and mobile phone companies are being considered to provide secure login mechanisms for private-sector services. “Facebook and people like that are potential providers,” a spokesman for the Cabinet Office said. The office will choose later this month.

Researcher estimates 63.5M Facebook users in China – About 63.5 million users in China are using Facebook, despite a ban on the social network in the country, according to London-based researcher GlobalWebIndex. The number is up from 7.9 million when China restricted access to the service in 2009. Blocked sites can be accessed through proxy services, which connect users to servers outside the country so they can visit sites that are filtered.

Zuckerberg visits Russia – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg visited Russia this week, meeting with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, appearing on a late night talk show and supporting Facebook’s Developer World Hack 2012, a talent recruitment effort. Facebook has fewer than 10 million users in Russia, compared to the local social network VKontakte, which has nearly 35 million users. ”Medvedev and Zuckerberg have discussed Facebook’s possible presence in Russia not only as a social network, but also as a company that deals with the most advanced products. They have also discussed Skolkovo as a place where startups could be of mutual interest,” said Natalya Timakova Medvedev’s press secretary.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

“People with strong attachments to the Republican Party were more likely to see their paper as leaning toward Clinton, independent of the paper’s actual coverage. Similarly, people with strong democratic identification were likely to see their newspaper as leaning toward Bush,” wrote (PDF) Professor Russell Dalton, in an eye-opening 1992 study about how partisanship blinds us to the fact that there are great things to say about both political parties. Despite writing exactly five articles for and against each political party since July 24th, I and some of our other writers have been accused of being partisan shills, selling out our journalistic integrity to hock the brain-dead policies of whatever party my friends, colleagues, and readers happen to disagree with. Yet, there are very good psychological reasons why both political parties have unique technological advantages and why its so difficult for us to accept this fact.

The collectivist tendencies of liberals easily transform into decentralized grassroots around a single candidate, whereas individualist conservatives happily take a technological ax to governmental services. Unfortunately, experimental research on the perception of bias in the media finds that partisans are so desperate to be right that it’s easier to blame the media than accept the hard truth that we live in a world where smart people can disagree with us.

Community and Liberals

For the last three presidential cycles, the tectonic innovations in campaigning have almost universally come from Democrats: the campaign for former Democratic party chairman, Howard Dean, created decentralized online organizing with Meetup.com, Senator John Kerry popularized Dean’s use of online fundraising for his own presidential bid, and Barack Obama ushered in campaigning to the social media age. And, there’s a very good reason for the politically lopsided innovation: the liberal tendency towards community and collectivism, psychologists have found, breeds technological experimentation with tools of decentralized action.

“The left not only chooses more participatory technology, but also uses the available technological tools to maintain more fluid relations between secondary or user-contributed materials and those of primary contributors,” explained a study of online political blogs from the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “The left is more egalitarian in opportunities for speech, more discursive, and more collaborative in managing the sites.”

So, when the Democratic National Convention crushes Republicans in terms of Twitter activity (Michelle Obama saw more than twice the tweets per second during her speech than during Mitt Romney’s), it shouldn’t come as a shock: on average, liberals are more attracted to the chaos of a social media conversation. As a result, tech stories gushing about the social media of campaigns will invariably shed liberals in a positive light more often.

Small Government, More Technology

“Because technology has the potential of making government more efficient, less expensive to run, and more accountable, it’s not surprising that the Republicans are ahead of the Democrats in the use of technology in governing,” Andrew Rasiej, founder and publisher of Tech President, told me. Republicans, at least in Congress, have been the uncontested party of open and interactive government. For instance, the Republican leadership championed the DATA Act, which would make all federal funding transparent and traceable. House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, developed one of the United States’ first avenues of direct democracy with Youcut, a online project that binds congressmen to propose cutting federal programs based on a process of SMS-voting from citizens.

The conservative principle of austerity has bled into the 2012 Republican presidential campaign. Mitt Romney’s Digital Director, Zac Moffatt (who will be joining us at Disrupt this week) has managed get Silicon Valley’s brightest minds to build out his online strategy, mostly for free. So, when open government veterans who now work on the presidential campaign, such as Matt Lira, use their connections to hook up innovative tech partnerships, such as VP candidate Paul Ryan’s recent policy chat on a Google+ hangout, it’s only natural that Republicans will look like Silicon Valley champions in the press.

A Difficult Truth To Swallow

So, why is it so difficult to see the press as politically unbiased, and both sides as intelligent? Experimental research [pdf] has found that partisan readers interpret facts and data opposed to their views as hostile. Rather than accept that every issue is a difficult choice between two reasonable alternatives, it’s easier to selectively dismiss the parts of a news article that contradict the way we want to see the world.

More interestingly, when news articles are presented as a mere “student essay” the contradictory facts do not trigger the same perceptions of bias and hostility in the media. It turns out, when we read a story, we’re concerned about how others, less educated or enlightened than ourselves, will interpret the facts. Contradictory facts “prompt partisans to consider interpretations or implications they think could be misleading to a naïve and vulnerable audience of others. Hence, they interpret the same information in a different, and disagreeable way,” write the researchers.

It’s easier to villainize and insult the other side; it’s difficult to reflect critically on our own beliefs and those we support. TechCrunch, however, will continue to praise cleverness and call out BS wherever we see it–and whomever from.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Reed Hundt was chairman of the United States Federal Communications Commission from 1993 to 1997. He served under President Bill Clinton and currently serves as CEO of the Coalition For Green Capital.

The government had a critical role in fostering the growth of the Internet during its commercial infancy in the early 90s; I witnessed this first-hand at the FCC, when we worked with Al Gore and Congress to expand access and reduce barriers for this new medium. We thought it could become, and we wanted it to be become, the dominant medium for information exchange for the country and the world. Two governmental initiatives in particular, eliminating the interstate connection charges collected by the local telephone company and connecting classrooms and libraries to the web, greatly helped the Internet fulfill its destiny.

Some critics assert that the inability or reluctance of the American government to regulate the Internet proves that the absence of government permitted the innovation of the Internet to flourish. Very recently, Verizon is arguing in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that not only should broadband be unregulated, but also any owner of a communications network (presumably wireless, wireline, cable, broadcast, satellite and wireline) has the right under the First Amendment to control what is sent over its network, to whom it is sent, and how much can be charged for the transmission – or in other words, almost no regulation is permissible under the Constitution, even if regulation were a good idea, which it is not, according to Verizon.

The skepticism, or in Verizon’s case, outright rejection of the role of government misses the importance of the government in clearing the way for the Internet to make its way through the bottlenecks and market power of the existing communications industry in the salad days of packet-switched technology as a commercial and social phenomenon. As a result, the proper role of government in the future of the Internet is also misleading.

On a weekly or bi-weekly basis, Vice President Gore convened a group in his West Wing office to outline the communications policy for the United States. The prevailing idea was that unregulated competition instead of regulated monopoly would be the fundamental paradigm for economic regulation of communications networks. That was a reversal of the approach of the 1934 Communications Act. This new paradigm found its way into the 1993 Omnibus Reconciliation Act’s grant of authority to the FCC to auction wireless licenses in a way that permitted the creation of a robustly competitive multi-firm wireless industry, supplanting the two-firm duopoly that had previously been in place.

In the case of the Internet, the new paradigm manifested itself in the Telecommunications Act signed by President Clinton in February 1996. When we at the FCC put that law into practice through regulatory authority, we took various specific steps to foster thousands of firms that provided Internet access. Ultimately, AOL emerged as the big winner, and of course was the only one that achieved movie stardom, but for all the ISPs in the dial-up age, it was critical that we allowed them free use of the telephone network without paying – some may recall that the first version of connecting to the Internet was the unplugging of the telephone line from the telephone and plugging it into the computer instead. We blessed this maneuver without charging the internet access companies the same three cents a minute that the long distance companies, AT&T, MCI, and Sprint, paid the local Bells for connection to the local telephone networks.

Using the internet for a half hour a day, a AOL customer would have had to pay about $30 a month directly or indirectly to the Bell companies, in addition to the $10 or so that AOL was charging. At those rates the Internet would have grown far more slowly, and the entire dot.com boom might never have occurred. Since the 1990s was the one decade since the 1970s in which every income quintile in America saw their income go up, this would have been an unfortunate alternative history. Moreover, every over-the-top company, from Yahoo! to Google and beyond, would have lacked the huge base of connected users that they had to pay very little to reach, and hence they would probably be worth mere fractions of what they are now worth, even assuming that they ever could have come into existence at all.

Underlying this and many other specific regulatory decisions too detailed to go into was the fundamental decision, reached under Gore’s leadership, that the Internet could and should become the dominant method of knowledge exchange for everyone in the world. This became a goal of international negotiations pursued by the Clinton Administration and was significantly advanced in a trade agreement signed by 69 countries in 1997.

In addition to adopting a pro-competition and pro-Internet regulatory, legislative, and treaty-based approach, the Clinton Administration sought to use the Internet to improve a suite of public goods. The most salient example was the introduction of the Internet into education. This was advanced by the hard-fought success in inserting in the 1996 Telecommunications Act a provision allowing the FCC to collect from telephone company subscribers several billion dollars a year which in turn it gave to school districts to pay for Internet access in classrooms. More than $20 billion has been spent on achieving this goal, and it has not been a minor reason why both education is being revolutionized by the Internet and why the youngest generation in America, whether growing up rich or poor, is Internet-savvy.

We Americans have much more to do to tap the potential of the Internet. The new goal is to achieve abundance – much more bandwidth carrying many more public goods in virtual form, to all of us everywhere anytime we want to be connected. The methods must be debated, but nothing in history suggests that government should play no role in opening the door to a better future not just for profit-seeking firms but also everyone in society.

[Image via Wikipedia]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Republican Presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, may hold the most unpopular stance in American history: he wants to ban as much porn as he can. A 2007 video (below) of Romney promising to place porn filters on every new computer have resurfaced after his legal adviser “assured” President Reagan’s anti-porn legal crusader that Romney sticks by his pledge to curtail porn and resumes prosecution under latent federal obscenity laws.

“Computer pornography has given new meaning to the words ‘home invasion,’” Romney said at a 2007 Values Voter summit, “If I am President, I will work to make sure that every computer sold into the home has an easy to engage pornography filter so that every parent can protect their child from unwanted filth.” Federal obscenity laws used to prosecute porn moguls, such as Hustler’s Larry Flynt, have largely been limited to child pornography since the rise of the Internet, but there’s an open debate as to whether they could be reactivated.

According to The Daily Caller, Romney’s foreign and legal policy director, Alex Wong, personally assured former Justice Department porn prosecutors Patrick Truman and Bob Flores, that a Presidential Romney would go after porn peddlers with a pitchfork. “Wong assured us that Romney is very concerned with this, and that if he’s elected these laws will be enforced,” Trueman told The Daily Caller. ”They promised to vigorously enforce federal adult obscenity laws.”

Prosecutions fell out of fashion with the Clinton administration, whose Attorney General, Janet Reno, didn’t feel the need to make it a priority. The momentum carried over to the Bush administration. “My understanding was that after 9/11 hit, [Attorney General John Ashcroft] was advised that he’d look frivolous if he did pornography cases,” Trueman said.

The hasn’t stopped die-hard moral crusaders from keeping the promise of obscenity prosecutions on a legal respirator for a time when they can be resuscitated. Utah Senator and libertarian arch-nemesis, Orrin Hatch, recently wrote a strongly worded letter urging current Attorney General Eric Holder to resume the porn purge. Even the Utah Attorney General’s website is keeping hope alive, stating:

“Many people believe material must be legal if it is available in their community such as at a store, on television or on the radio. This belief is false. The mere fact that the material is available does not mean it is legal, but law enforcement cannot seize suspected pornographic material without a court order… Citizen complaints are crucial for prosecutions to occur.”

Legally speaking, porn isn’t protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court gave porn prosecutors a present in Miller v. California (1973), declaring that “patently offensive” material that appeals to prurient interests must confirm to contemporary “community standards.”

The ability of a particularly squeamish community to ban porn was once confined to certain geographical locations, but, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation warns, the Internet reaches all communities, and at least one previous court held this to mean that content should conform to the community “most likely to be offended by the message.”

“I think they would probably prosecute”, Flynt said, of Romney’s potential attorney general, but he isn’t worried, “they have nothing to do with the success of the prosecution.”

Cracking down on morally objectionable material might be an unpopular move, but past Attorneys General, such as Alberto Gonzales, have been known to stretch the legal limits of the law to ram through the interests of the current president.

[Image Credit, Flickr User Feathers]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When Yahoo hired Scott Thompson as CEO back in January, many at the company were surely hoping that they’d finally found the game-changing leader they’d so sorely needed for years. Now just four months later, Thompson is only serving to highlight the exact deep-rooted corporate sluggishness that he was meant to upend.

There have been lots of rumors about the internal progress of Scott Thompson’s resume-gate (Kara Swisher at AllThingsD has an especially good handle on these inside scoops.) But in a way, the outwardly confirmed facts of the matter — or really, the lack thereof — increasingly speak for themselves. Each hour that passes without an official decision from Yahoo seems to show that the company is in even worse shape than anyone thought.

Today Yahoo issued a press release announcing it has “formed a special committee to conduct a thorough review of CEO Scott Thompson’s academic credentials.” This is probably supposed to be a sign of progress, but it comes across as just the opposite. The release says that the “special committee and the entire Board appreciate the urgency of the situation,” but do they really? This issue came to light on May 3. Today is May 8.

We all know that Yahoo hasn’t been known for lighting-fast innovation for a long time. An 18-year-old publicly traded global corporation will tend to slow down a bit. But it’s still pretty shocking that the board can’t show some hustle for a situation like this. As Mike Arrington has very artfully written, Yahoo’s rank-and-file employees deserve better.

True story: This year, I received my tax refund check from the state of California exactly four days after I filed my taxes. My tax refund, through snail mail, from California, which is a very large and notoriously mismanaged state that everyone keeps saying is basically going bankrupt. Just for reference, here is a short list of some other pretty complicated things that have lasted (or will last) fewer than five days:

• The Papal conclave for the selection of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005

• The Papal conclave for the selection of Pope John Paul II in 1978

• The U.S. Senate’s closed door deliberations on the final verdict of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1999

• The average birth of a human baby

• The life span of a gastrotrich

• The TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012 Hackathon and Conference (May 19-23, shameless plug)

Anyway, we’re considering doing a special TechCrunch logo with Scott Thompson’s face as our own smoke signal sort of vigil to mark the time until the board figures it all out. Any over/under on how long it would be there?

It’s not just start-ups that radically innovate. Take, for example, Autodesk, the 3D design, engineering and entertainment software giant that, according to its President and CEO Carl Bass, continues to be “incredibly relevant” in the innovation economy. “The most creative people use our tools,” Bass told me about popular Autodesk software like Sketchbook, Pixlr and Instructables, when I talked to him at The Economist‘s Innovation event in Berkeley last week. And Bass’ optimism extends to the future where, he told me, all of Autodesk’s products will have migrated online and the cloud, mobile and social will have radically transformed its business. Indeed, in 5 years time, he predicts, computing will become an “abundant resource” thereby providing Autodesk with even richer opportunities to create innovative design, engineering and entertainment software.

This conversation is part of a series that I recorded last week in Berkeley at the Innovation event. Check out my interviews with Stewart Brand, Clay Christensen and Vivek Wadhwa. Tomorrow, I’ll publish interviews about innovation with Don Tapscott and Laura Tyson, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under the Clinton Administration.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Richard Fontaine, a Senior Advisor at the Center for a New American Security, is the co-author of Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age. Follow him @rhfontaine.

Twitter has taken fire in recent days from activists and bloggers who fear that the company’s new censorship policies will muffle online freedom. News reports recall the ways in which protestors have had made use of Twitter to oppose dictatorships, and dissidents express concern that their ability to communicate will be harmed. The more immediate issue, however, may lie elsewhere. Twitter’s new policies demonstrate vividly the complicated relationship between Internet freedom and democratic government.

The complications take on greater importance in light of America’s global Internet freedom strategy. The U.S. government began an active policy of promoting Internet freedom in the second George W. Bush term, and its efforts have accelerated in the Obama administration. The State Department devotes tens of millions of dollars to support technology and training for online dissidents, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has given a series of major speeches highlighting the issue. In one, she invoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous four freedoms, added a fifth — the “freedom to connect” — and observed that “the spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet.”

It is easy to imagine two sides locked in pitched battle over Internet freedom: The democracies, embracing the freedom to connect for all, and the dictatorships, who censor, monitor, and disrupt. Indeed, pressing the cause of Internet freedom has thus far generally meant taking on autocracies, like Beijing and its Great Firewall, the Mubarak regime when it shuttered Egypt’s Internet during the 2011 protests, or Iran as it systematically monitors domestic dissidents. But it has become increasingly clear that autocracies alone do not challenge Internet freedom; democracies do as well.

In the blog post explaining its new policy, Twitter hit on this truth, noting that the company will be active in “countries that have different ideas” than the United States “about the contours of freedom of expression.” All democracies restrict speech to some degree, and the forms of banned expression vary, ranging from child pornography (which is illegal virtually everywhere) to hate speech (banned in Europe and other places but not the United States) to country-specific expression (such as criticism of national heroes or monarchs).

America, however, is an outlier. The United States recognizes some limits on free expression – slander, perjury, “fighting words” and certain other forms of expression are illegal online or off – but its commitment to free speech is nevertheless the most absolute of any major country. This puts it in potential conflict with fellow democracies about what constitute legitimate restrictions on online expression. Given Washington’s role as the world’s most active proponent of Internet freedom, it also complicates its efforts to rally fellow democracies behind the cause.

The examples of differing democratic practice abound. Witness, for example, the recent request by Indian telecommunications minister Kapil Sibal to Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others that they remove content deemed insulting to leaders of the Indian Congress party. Mr. Sibal pledged that his government would take unspecified steps to act if the private sector would not. This month, during a hearing on a related case, an Indian high court justice said that, “like China,” the government could block websites entirely if their hosts do not remove offensive content. Turkey banned YouTube for two years because it refused to remove videos that Turkish courts deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Germany and other countries prohibit Holocaust denial online, and France bans the sale of Nazi paraphernalia over the Internet. Governments in Britain, Italy and Germany have established lists of blocked websites – generally those containing child pornography, hate speech, or online gambling platforms – even though those lists are not always transparent.

The differences arise not only in national policy, but in international law as well. A number of European democracies, including Denmark, France, Slovenia and Switzerland, have signed an additional protocol to the European Convention on Cybercrime, which requires them criminalize such acts as using computers to distribute xenophobic material or insult people because of their race, religion, or ethnic origin.

The United States faces its own potential contradictions. Secretary Clinton used one of her major addresses on Internet freedom to explain why the notion did not apply when Wikileaks published thousands of classified cables online. A district court recently ruled that, as part of its lawful intercept authorities, the Justice Department can seize Twitter feeds. And then there is the tremendous debate that has emerged over the Stop Online Privacy Act.

The truth is that the U.S. government will always enforce some limits on free expression, and our political system will continually wrestle with where the limits should be drawn. But we should not allow this to undermine the important cause of promoting global Internet freedom. Authoritarian governments will inevitably attempt to shield themselves from criticism and pressure by pointing to democracies that ban online expression. Denying them the opportunity to do so successfully will require the United States and other to articulate, publicly and consistently, the critical distinction between the restrictions placed on online speech by democracies and the repression favored by many autocracies.

The distinction rests not only in the kind of banned speech, but also in the process by which the decision to restrict it is made. True democracies bar forms of expression based on law and regulation, and they make decisions to do so in accordance with due process. Their pronouncements are generally transparent, with decision makers accountable to the law, to legislatures, and ultimately to the people, who can turn them out of office in periodic elections. There is a world of difference between a democracy banning speech on “security” grounds when the citizens know what the decision is, who made it, and how to change it, and a dictatorship banning its own “security”-infringing speech by autocratic fiat.

It is crucial to make that distinction clear. Doing so can benefit America’s diplomatic effort to promote Internet freedom, and it may also help guide policymakers at home. Resolving tough new issues often involves complex considerations of technology, law, and fundamental principle. In remembering what makes a democratic approach to the Internet distinctive, we might avoid falling prey to measures that would suggest we are otherwise.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch