The Right to Link is at Risk

You’ve probably heard the old description of the Internet as a “series of tubes.” The quotation by U.S. Senator Ted Stevens made for a lot of laughs, but it wasn’t a great description: the Internet you and I browse in the form of the world wide web is better described as a series of links. Web content is hosted on one or more computers and then accessed by others. In the same way you might tell a friend about a new taco restaurant, a link tells your computer where to find a given piece of content. Without links to route everyone around the web, we wouldn’t have an Internet. They power Facebook, they power Google, they power your favorite blog, they power everything. Links aren’t good or bad. They’re the online equivalent of roads, moving people around the Internet.

Alarmingly, links are under threat from parties who would break this fundamental part of the net trying (and up to now failing) to protect their out-dated business models.

So far, the groups trying to destroy the link fall into roughly two categories: Big Media, who push draconian copyright rules and link censorship as a failing answer to filesharing and user-generated content; and Big Government, which attempts to block or ban links to material it doesn’t think citizens should have access to.

Here’s the TL;DR: censoring links breaks the Internet.

Here’s an example: in Spain, Big Media is pushing for laws that will effectively censor snippets of copyrighted news content, as well as links to legal content generally. Not only will this grievously injure the ability of independent news media and bloggers to do their jobs, but it will also hurt search engine results, which rank a given page based on how many other pages link to it.

Perhaps more importantly it creates uncertainty and discourages those who want to start up new online platforms or invest in them. Why start up an online service if there are looming restrictive copyright laws that break your creation?

Laws currently provide cover for our favourite services like Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, Vimeo, and others. They may be obliged to take down offending material or send notices to their users who are breaking the law, but, crucially, they are not on the hook for every link their users post.

You could think of it as a “don’t shoot the messenger” rule. This immunity for intermediaries is one of the central pillars of the way today’s Internet works because it lets creativity and expression flourish freely without every post everywhere needing a lawyer’s approval. If anything, the “notice and takedown” system should be reformed to the reasonable “notice-and-notice” or the “judicial notice and takedown” system preferred by OpenMedia and other digital rights organizations.

As experts have pointed out, however, groups like the Motion Picture Association of America have been on the warpath ever since the failure of the Stop Online Piracy ACT (SOPA) to try to hang liability on service providers and site operators.

In their long, often counterproductive battle against piracy, they’ve used different strategies (from regional laws to international trade deals like the TPP) to try to make Internet Service Providers and popular sites liable for users’ online activities. It hasn’t stuck so far, but they’re continuing their efforts in many parts of the world.

If the Big Media companies get their way, it could unleash some terrifying lawsuits and pretty much guarantee that hundreds of millions of innocent people’s online activity would be subject to pre-filtering and monitoring. Once in place, a system like that could easily be deployed to block politically unpopular material and other speech in a way similar to the great firewall of China.  

In fact, that’s already happening: in the UK, experts have widely condemned the government’s new filter system for censoring a wide range of links to suicide prevention materials, sexual education sites, completely legal peer-to-peer content, and even news media, thanks to its overbroad keyword censorship. What’s worse is that the Cameron government is now following the French government’s lead and asking Parliament for further powers to censor links to ‘extremist content’.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Big Media has been waging a long, secret war against the Internet to stop copyright infringement at all costs. Media lobbyists and lawyers have been fighting wars with search engines, pressuring lawmakers to block access to websites, and attempting to block links and data at the border.

In the EU, these same lobbyists have been working with the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to pressure lawmakers to upload the aforementioned Spanish link censorship laws to the EU level, which would have a profound effect on over 500 million citizens’ ability to use the Internet.  

In Australia, the government is considering blocking links to popular torrent sites hosting thousands of links to legal shared content, all in an ineffective effort to favour large US media conglomerates.

Every successful scheme to censor our right to link weakens the foundation of the Internet. Bit by bit, they add up into something resembling the great firewall of China, which directly impinges on free speech, hurts the economy, and suppresses dissent.

And all of these examples have one basic thing in common: media content owners and governments aim to indiscriminately censor links – a basic building block of the web – simply because some links may be used for unlawful activity, somewhere, at some point.

It’s akin to blocking off sections of highways with little or no justification just because a criminal might drive on them at some point. Meanwhile, the rest of us need to get where we’re going.  

The bottom line is this: links are essential to freedom of expression online (and increasingly offline as well). And it’s no exaggeration to say that censoring links will break the Internet as we know it. If even one of these censorship schemes really takes hold it will affect all of us using the web and undermine its basic foundation.

As more and more threats to the link emerge, it’s more important than ever that users and organizations come together to defend our right to link.