Is the internet really the standard bearer of free speech in the modern world? Or is it merely an artery for the West to impose its ideology on the rest?

These were the questions we were left asking after Google’s revelation that its networks were attacked from inside China sparked an international debate about free speech and human rights.

The US government and the European Commission condemned the attacks as a violation of free speech, but it was Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Washington Newseum that prompted the Chinese to respond.

Clinton told the audience that the US supports a “single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas”. She said electronic barriers to portions of the internet violated the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

She spoke of the spread of information networks “forming a new nervous system for our planet”. The internet, she said, “stands for connection”.

“Amid this unprecedented surge in connectivity, we must also recognise that these technologies are not an unmitigated blessing. These tools are being exploited to undermine human progress and political rights,” she said.

China’s state-controlled press promptly responded by saying that Clinton’s speech would be regarded as a “new threat”.

“The US campaign for uncensored and free flow of information on an unrestricted internet is a disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy,” the Global Times stated in an editorial.

“The hard fact that Clinton has failed to highlight in her speech is that [the] bulk of information flowing from the US and other Western countries is loaded with aggressive rhetoric against those countries that do not follow their lead,” the editorial continued.

The internet did not represent a “free flow” of information, the paper said, because disadvantaged countries cannot produce as much information as Western countries.

Read more:
‘Clinton warns of “information curtain”’, ZDNet UK, 22 January 2010