ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a quick overview of the ways in which ten democratic countries, with varying population size, socio-political structure, and pluralist institutions (Lijphart, 1999), attempt to control the Internet, protect their NII and, more generally, develop an information society.1 All the ten countries (Australia, Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland) identified on-line threats that required some control on the Internet. Cybercrime, child pornography, and computer frauds were the worries causing greatest concern for most of them. However, each country characterized those threats in light of its own specific national culture. In his study of counterterrorism policies, Katzenstein (2003: 734) stressed the importance of ‘‘how threats are constructed politically.’’ National processes of threat construction are crucial elements in the debate on Internet control and so are the general political economic orientation of the governments in office and the aggregation of domestic interests. If the private sector has the habit of working together with the cabinet
or being closely associated with it, if the structure of political economic interests is corporatist, or if the necessity of ‘‘total defense’’ prevents businesses from being confrontational with the executive and so on, Internet users and civil liberties NGOs have a difficult time in steering government policies away from greater Internet control. The high level of pluralism in a country is necessary to guarantee multiple views on policy-making and to use the multiple access points to cabinets and legislation, but alone it is not sufficient. Only when companies support or sympathize with users and their NGOs that represent their interests, will they then work together to curb government control of the network. Users are also a sample of the public. Hence, if the public traditionally loathes neo-Nazi or hatred speech, it is likely that users will consider it ‘‘natural’’ that freedom of speech in their country does not protect hate crimes, whether on-or off-line. All these ten countries examined and their publics rejected any justification that might be used to exempt child pornography from prosecution. Child pornographers have indeed exploited the constitutional guarantees that protect freedom of speech in democratic states to hide the content of their communications.
