Net Censorship Central to U.S. Foreign Policy

The State Department has made Internet censorship a key pillar of its foreign policy and now factors the issue into its diplomatic relations with every other nation, a senior official from the department said on June 11.

In every meeting with foreign dignitaries, "this issue is on the table," Alec Ross, senior advisor for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said here at an event hosted by the Media Access Project, a nonprofit law firm and advocacy group. "Internet freedom has gone from being something that's a piece of what could at best be called a piece of foreign policy arcanum -- a little thing that a handful of people work on -- to something becoming increasingly central in our foreign policy," Ross said. Ross said that while much of the media attention devoted to online censorship focuses on prominent countries like China and Iran, the issue is much broader and the State Department sees the situation getting worse. "2009 was the worst year in history in terms of Internet freedom," he said. "There are now literally dozens of countries with less-than-stellar Internet freedom records. And it's increasingly the case that governments view the Internet as less something built on a single end-user-to-end-user principle than something that can be sort of built to spec, that looks and feels and works more like an intranet than an Internet."