22 Oct 2012 | Azerbaijan Statements, Campaigns
Index on Censorship joined more than 40 global media organisations demanding governments, the United Nations and industry take action against violence towards journalists.
The joint statement was delivered yesterday to the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and marks the second International Day to End Impunity on November 23. The issue will be discussed at the 2nd UN Inter Agency meeting on Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity, to take place 22-23 November in Vienna. (more…)
17 Sep 2012 | Uncategorized
In the past decade, there has been a boom in mobile phone subscriptions, jumping from fewer than one billion in 2000 to six billion in 2012. Seventy-seven per cent of those subscriptions are now owned by individuals in developing countries. Digital access, on the other hand, trails far behind with only 35 per cent of the world actually online. But this is likely to improve, particularly with the rise of smartphones, which currently make up about a quarter of the 4 billion phones in use globally.
Even with expected improvement in technology and falling prices of production, increasing mobile access relies on more than simply lowering the prices of handsets. Lack of access to a mobile phone is tied to factors such as gender and economic inequality. In developing countries, for example, women are 21per cent less likely than men to own a mobile phone.
India has a high rate of mobile penetration, with 76.8 per cent of its 1.2 billion population using mobile phones. Gender norms also have a role in whose hands mobile phones fall into, as only 28 per cent of India’s mobile phone owners are women, versus 40 per cent for men.
Lower prices are expected to help make smartphones more accessible in India, as they currently only account for 10 million of the estimated 960 million mobile phone users in the country.
While Brazil has a high mobile phone penetration rate (99.8 per cent), the massive economic divide contributes to some of the challenges in mobile access in the country. According to a recent study, many residents of Brazil’s slums (favelas) share phones or steal them because of the outrageous prices of mobile phones and unfamiliarity with technology. The country also has the third-highest rates for mobile services in the world. Smartphone penetration in Brazil is at about 14 per cent, and will only increase if the price of mobile services and handsets decrease.
The United Kingdom has its own divide, with smartphone penetration at 51.3 per cent. However, ownership of a smartphone does not necessarily mean that the owner understands how to use it. Many users only use them to simply make phone calls and send text messages. Users might be unaware that their rights may be diminished through filtering and blocking that automatically comes with many smartphones in the UK. This only shows how important it is to build literacy around technology across the globe. Access also does not simply rely on prices, it also relies on 3G infrastructure.
Thanks to improved mobile phone technology, and improved networks, more people will be online, bringing us a step forward in not only increasing mobile access, but also bridging the digital divide — and that increase in availability only makes it more important to protect free expression online.
Sara Yasin is an Editorial Assistant at Index on Censorship
12 Sep 2012 | Americas, Digital Freedom
Brazil is close to passing the world’s first internet bill of rights. The Marco Civil da Internet aims to guarantee basic protections for internet users. In development since 2009, the civil regulatory framework was created through public consultation and has undergone many changes, eventually reaching the Brazilian Chamber this year. The bill has catapulted Brazil to a progressive position in digital policymaking, potentially serving as a model for other countries trying to balance user rights against interests of online companies and law enforcement. The crucial vote will take place in Brazil’s Congress on 19 September.
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28 Aug 2012 | Digital Freedom, Uncategorized
December will see the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a specialised UN agency that sets standards for international telephony. The Dubai-based conference will bring together 190 nations and, while members have been meeting behind closed doors, various policy proposals have been leaked by activists on the website WCITLeaks.
There are huge decisions at stake over the future of internet governance, with the battle lines being drawn between governments that see the access to information as a matter of human rights, and others that consider the control of information to be an issue for the state.
Russia and China have been putting forward proposals to regulate certain areas of the web — citing the old axioms of crime and security, for one. These are areas which are currently unregulated due to, as Rebecca MacKinnon writes, a “lack of international consensus over what those terms actually mean or over how to balance enforcement with the protection of citizens’ rights.” Of course, this is not the first time these two nations have banged that drum against Western domination over such institutions or asserted their national sovereignty over cyberspace.Nor is it just authoritarian regimes with patchy human rights records that are citing these as justification for national control of the web. A year ago, Brazil and South Africa called for a global internet governance body to be located within the UN system.
Opponents believe such proposals encroach upon the free and open nature of the internet. If the governance of the internet were in the hands of a UN body, this trend of individual nations exerting overt censorship will be strengthened. Russia’s creation last month of a blacklist of websites that promote drugs or suicide or contain porn or “extremist” materials is just one example of a trend in which free expression is continually chilled. China, a country of 500 million internet users, also finds sophisticated ways of censoring the web (see Dinah Gardner’s thorough explainer here).
Yet the current multi-stakeholder approach is not without its problems, either (MacKinnon gives an illuminating rundown of the current governance ecosystem here). As Katitza Rodriguez of the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted at a panel this summer, “a large part of the world’s population feels excluded from international Internet policy making venues.” While this is certainly the case, this exclusion is exacerbated when restrictive internet policies are imposed on the world by a handful of governments pursuing a national agenda.
A major challenge will be diversifying the multi-stakeholder model to include more voices who are not only the most affected by but also vulnerable to repressive internet policies, as MacKinnon has highlighted.
But as actors work out which governance model suits the web — and freedom of expression — best, December’s conference, as Index trustee John Kampfner writes, marks “just the start of the battle between those who wish to keep the internet (relatively) free and those who will do everything in their power to reverse the process.” More power games lie ahead in the fight for online freedom.
Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index. She tweets at @martaruco
