China has built the world’s most sophisticated system of digital surveillance and censorship in an effort to control what internet users say and do online.Sim Chi Yin/The Globe and Mail
Late last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping helmed a Politburo session dedicated to “strengthening the governance of the internet” and cracking down on “internet chaos,” a euphemism for misinformation, discord and dissent online.
Since the genesis of the internet, China has sought to control what people do and say online, building up the world’s most sophisticated system of digital surveillance and censorship, the Great Firewall. For decades, Beijing was an outlier in its approach to the internet – Bill Clinton famously dismissed online censorship as akin to “nailing Jell-O to a wall” – but this is no longer the case.
Many authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning countries have already adopted Chinese-style online controls, often with the assistance of Chinese technology companies and officials. This has only sped up as, under President Donald Trump, the United States has retreated from its traditional role in promoting internet freedom, slashing funding to or shutting down programs dedicated to anti-censorship efforts.
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Worryingly, many democracies are now headed in a similar direction. Skepticism about Washington’s influence over big tech under Mr. Trump, and the aggressively political turn of Silicon Valley billionaires like Elon Musk, has driven support for cybersovereignty in Europe and elsewhere. This concept, first developed by Chinese technologists, abandons the idea of the internet as a shared global resource, and calls for countries to throw up online border controls and adopt protectionist policies.
In Britain and parts of the U.S., politicians are also rapidly heading down a slippery slope of outright censorship as they try to crack down on adult content. In both countries, legislators have required age verification checks for sites hosting adult content, an approach that sounds reasonable on paper but becomes a nightmare in practice.
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Researchers have raised major privacy concerns over the technology used for age checks – often selfie videos or scans of official identification – and warned it drives users away from mainstream adult sites, which must implement the checks or risk their business, to smaller, sketchier services on the open and dark web, many of which host illegal and pirated content.
The British Online Safety Act is so broadly drafted that even services like Reddit or Spotify have felt obliged to introduce age checks, rather than risk falling foul of the law’s penalties. Wikipedia has sued to try to avoid a similar fate.
In many cases, these laws are being pushed by activist groups that, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, have sought to “aggressively expand the definition of ‘harmful to minors’ to censor a broad swath of content: diverse educational materials, sex education resources, art, and even award-winning literature.”
As in authoritarian countries, many citizens have turned to a simple tool to avoid all of this: virtual private networks, which encrypt and tunnel a user’s online traffic, so someone in Britain can turn on a VPN and use the internet as if they are in comparatively free Switzerland.
In Britain, children’s commissioner Rachel de Souza has called VPNs a “loophole that needs closing,” while in Wisconsin and other U.S. states, there is legislation in the works that would ban VPNs outright. Mr. Xi would be forgiven for feeling satisfied as he noted, during the Politburo session, that “governance of the internet ecosystem is a common issue facing all countries in the world.”
But as China has found, cracking down on VPNs is exceptionally difficult and extremely disruptive. While they can be blocked at a protocol level – and Beijing does so at times of political sensitivity – this is the nuclear option, taking out both private VPNs and those used by banks, companies and embassies, meaning even in China, VPNs are not blocked entirely most of the time.
Even in China, a full crackdown on VPNs is very difficult and can disrupt operations by banks, companies and embassies.ALY SONG/Reuters
It’s unlikely systems in the West will be more sophisticated than the Great Firewall, so VPN bans will ultimately fail, leaving many workarounds for more technically savvy users. But this will still result in millions of people – students, journalists, researchers, abuse survivors, activists – having their VPN access impeded and privacy reduced.
Age checks for VPNs are one solution, and indeed many private VPNs already essentially have one, as they require a credit card to use. But like with adult sites, this leads to the proliferation of “free” VPNs or other censorship-bypassing tools that spy on users and sell their data, a common problem in China.
There are legitimate and pressing concerns about how young people interact with the internet today, and opposing censorship does not mean opposing regulation or moderation. But laws must be drafted so that they preserve people’s right to privacy and free expression, even when the ultimate goal is a laudable one like protecting children, and it is not clear many lawmakers in the West advocating for new rules understand the path they are taking.
“Attacks on VPNs are attacks on digital privacy and digital freedom,” the EFF said in a statement. “And this battle is being fought by people who clearly have no idea how any of this technology actually works.”
James Griffiths, The Globe and Mail’s Asia correspondent, is the author of The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet.