Leslie Harris, Protecting the Internet As a Global Medium for Freedom, The Huffington Post, Nov. 4, 2008

Since the Internet’s earliest days, it has been an article of faith that the medium’s global expansion would herald a new era of freedom, unrestrained by the world’s governments. We were told that "information wants to be free," or as one early Internet visionary put it, "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Under that utopian vision, government efforts to exert territorial authority would fail and what little governance may be needed would emerge from the user community. That vision has fallen by the wayside, as countries of all political persuasions step into the regulatory breach.

Even so, in much of the world, the open Internet remains a powerful tool for human rights and democracy as well as economic growth. While there are a myriad of disagreements about when and how government should intervene, power remains for the most part with innovators and users at the edge of the network, and as our presidential election season has shown, online civic discourse flourishes.

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