May 27

WRITTEN BY: Greg Goode
Thursday, 27 May 2010 

I happened to attend a debate presented by intelligence² titled Governments should not censor the internet. It was about governments’ role in censoring the internet (topical to us in Australia) to protect the ‘vunerable’ from content that is deemed too explicit or anti-social. You know what I mean, good old pornography, hate sites that attack race or culture, subversive sites that may be a threat to homeland security, violence, peadaphilla, you name it … it’s all there on the world wide web.

So, are data centres part of the problem, and do they have a part to play in ensuring the likes of you and I are kept safe from information that could corrupt us?

In the debate, there was lots of talk about government’s role, the web, its content, and how one might protect oneself against such material (that is supposing one wants to be protected!). But I was wondering where the data centre fits into this discussion.

‘Hey,’ you ask, ‘what have data centres got to do with porn, hate and terrorism? Data centres are benign things, aren’t they? They just process 1’s and 0’s don’t they? How can binary information corrupt?’

There are thousands of data centres worldwide, harmlessly storing, indexing, processing and distributing all kinds of information. That information comes in the form of text, video and sound. Many sites are closed, so to speak. They are corporate sites addressing very specific information—finance, banking, government services, education, etc. One wouldn’t expect these sites to be the disseminators of information which might be a threat to one’s sensibilities, and to the most vunerable of all: our children.

But there are also world class data centre sites that provide space and host the very information some governments want to shut down. Data centres host the hardware and software, in the form of processors, operating systems, applications and storage, and they host the ISPs which provide our access to the ubiqitous web. This web weaves in and out of data centres worldwide and into our lives. 

Take YouTube. It’s hosted in very high-end data centres and it contains content that some would find highly offensive, but others find entertaining. And let’s not kid ourselves; porn doesn’t emanate from backyard PCs—it’s a US$97b a year industry. The purveyors of such material want good service and superior response time. Well-respected corporate data centres assist this industry and the other content that some want to censor.  A quick search on Google of the word ‘pornography’ returns 12 million-odd hits. Google and other search engines quite happily let me and you find it (and that’s not to imply they produce such material or content).  

So, who should be the gatekeeper of any information that supposedly corrupts our minds, our morals, our souls? Do we need one? Are we intillegent enough to look after ourselves?

The debate was waxing and waning as to where the control should be: at the government level, or left to the individual citizen or to parents in the case of children. (Interestingly, both sides concluded that governments aren’t trustworthy enough not to take advantage of the censorship situation to ratchet up the control over years to shut off other information.) The debaters identified other parties in the information chain, like ISPs, which could censor information using filters.

If we exend this thinking, then, data centres may be seen as the area of control. Hypothetically, someone in government could advocate that this industry execute government censorship policies.  Data centres consolidate the ‘offensive’ information, so it has to be easier to tackle at this end than chasing individual content producers. Even a more outlandish thought would be that governments could outsource the censorship role to the data centre corporations and have them be the arbiters of what we can see, read, etc. You may say ’no way‘, but crazier things have been proposed and implemented.

You may or may not know, but Google already practises this indirectly by removing references to content they deem to be offensive. Funny, I don’t remember Google being elected to act as censor on anybody’s behalf. They quite freely provide a wonderful search engine to find 12 million references to pornography. Go figure.

It’s quite clear data centres are definitely part of the equation when it comes to distributing sex, hate, intolerance and subversive messages, but should they be held accountable? Should they be part of the censorship regime?

It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? Censorship is a very contentious and emotive issue. We all know some governments practise censorship under various guises and it usually relates to repression of their citizens. Dragging data centres into this net of censorship control would be highly dangerous and one can foresee that the regulatory controls, the technical controls, etc., would all be complex and, on anedotal evidence, useless. There are so many ways to circumvent censorship. If one country’s censorship practice is not to the liking of a data centre provider as it affects their business, then they could seek out other countries where control is loose. Such things happen in shipping registration, finance, manufacturing, etc.

Undoubtedly the modern data centre has permitted the free-for-all flow of all types of information in all formats. But the last thing one would want, in a modern enlightened society, is data centres being throttled by governments or corporations. Let the individual decide. One of the participants in the debate I attended,highlighted that he had a Jewish background and that while he knew there was Jewish hate sites on the web, posted by neo-Nazi organisations, he was not for censoring them. Better to keep them above ground than have them go underground. He realised that if they were censored because they are deemed offensive then his own access to the same media to disseminate his information countering such hate was also under threat from censorship.

There are 6 billion of us on this planet and we all have different information needs. The modern data data centre and the internet have freed us to explore more information than our forefathers could ever have thought was possible. Let’s keep it that way.