The destiny of freedom and rights appears to be increasingly dependent on the strong thread that ties it to the Internet, to the digital world and the continuous novelties that it offers, the interests arising from it, the conflicts of interest that take on unprecedented dimensions and meaning. Freedom technologies merge with control technologies, the individualistic fragmentation entails the creation of new social links. The same distinction between what is mine and what is yours seems to give way to the sharing of everything that is accessible on the web, thus questioning the traditional foundations of an ownership that, to many, appears again as a “theft”, since knowledge is seen as independent from its author and takes on the appearance of a common good.
In this new world, where wonder and anxiety mingle, usual references are wavering and radical questions are being asked concerning the complex set-up of our societies. What powers are actually governing the world and what is the meaning of this entity hastily defined as the “people of the web”? This reality can be accessed in many ways and it is worth mentioning some of them.
The death of privacy was announced in many occasions. «The only privacy left is the inside of your head. And maybe that’s enough» (in the movie ‘Enemy of the State’, 1998). «You have no privacy: accept it» (Scott McNealy, managing director of Sun Microsystems, 1999). «Can privacy survive in an age of terror?» (cover of ‘Business Week’, November 2001). «Privacy? It is a concern of the past» (Facebook’s prophet Marc Zuckerberg, and Twitter’s Evan Williams, 2010).
In spite of this endless stream of highly peremptory announcements, the protection of personal data, i.e. of our “electronic body”, is considered as a fundamental right of all people by the Lisbon Treaty and by the Charter of fundamental rights of the European Union, which came into effect on December 1st, 2009. Are we faced with an aging constitutional logic, a legal theory that toys with illusions of the past? Then, let us look at one of the most sensational facts of the recent years, i.e. the refusal by Google to accept the censorship imposed by the Chinese government, which led to Hillary Clinton’s strong intervention in defence of freedom of expression and privacy for anybody navigating the Internet. Hence, not only is the thesis of privacy insignificance denied, but the relation within the so-called G2, i.e. between the two major powers, is deteriorated by a conflict rooted in two opposite visions of individual freedom.
Suddenly, the fundamental rights that have always been sacrificed to the imperatives of geopolitics and economic relations, appear on the international scene as an asset that cannot be swept aside by the predominance of political realism or by the technologists’ arrogant statements. All this takes place not only as a result of a burst of awareness of the deep meaning of rights, but for reasons related to the specificity of the Internet. Hillary Clinton was quite aware of what it means today to meet with the people of the web, spread beyond any kind of border. To the international public opinion, jealous of the new opportunities offered by technologies, she presented the United States as the champion of a freedom that is no longer “American” or “Western” (and, for this reason, always associated with the suspicion of an hegemonic claim of one culture over the others), but is perceived as universal for the mere fact that it is now shared by over two billion people. In the age of the (alleged) end of ideologies and the decline of any great “narrative”, these fundamental rights appear as a narrative capable of revealing the common root of the Iranian students’ protest, the refusal of censorship by the Chinese Internet users, the fight of African women against injustice.
But, through her intervention, Hillary Clinton has also uncovered the true power relations that innervate today’s world. Google is not just one of the most powerful multinational companies. It is a power in itself, stronger than the power of an infinite number of national states, with which it negotiates on the same level. To achieve this, it requires a strong - chiefly political - approval, that was obtained through the dramatic turn of events related to the conflict with China, which introduces it to the world as the champion of civil rights in the future leading countries. But this strong approval cannot be left to an economic subject, it cannot be “privatised”. In these conditions, the declaration of the American Secretary of State also sounds like the public claim of a role that politics cannot discard.
In fact, Google’s nature does not only involve the libertarian element that rightly aroused Timothy Garton Ash’s enthusiasm. Google is also an essential component of what was appropriately defined as «Big Data», with an obvious reference to the «Big Farma» used to describe the overwhelming power of pharmaceutical companies. Can these powers remain totally out of control?
This question has always worried the ‘people of the web’ who have, for a long time, seen any type of rule as an attack on their freedom. This was proudly proclaimed by John Perry Barlow in 1998, in the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: «Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, you have no sovereignty where we gather». The strength of the facts has denied this prevision. It is the national governments that are trying to tarnish Internet and its freedom and the time has therefore come not for coercive rules but for the opposite, that is constitutional guarantees for the web freedom, an Internet Bill of Rights. Hillary Clinton has announced to the UN an initiative on Internet freedom. However, this freedom is valid not only against the intrusiveness of the states, but is also projected towards the new “Lords of information” who, through gigantic data collections, govern our lives. In front of this situation, the word “privacy” calls to mind not only a need for intimacy, but synthesizes the freedom that belongs to us in the new world we live in. And Google embodies the simultaneous presence of opportunities of freedom and a sovereign power without control. Not a two-faced Janus, however, but a net that can be disentangled only by a “constitutional” initiative that should find its means of construction in the web itself.
The European Union can play a significant part in this process. Because, with the Charter of fundamental rights, it understood at an early stage the dimension of freedom on the web and acknowledged the protection of personal data as an independent fundamental right. But, even more so, because it should convince itself that it can exercise a political leadership, based on the fact that it is today the region of the world where the guarantee of fundamental rights is the strongest. On the other hand, we must sadly acknowledge that Italy (which, four years ago, was the first to go along the way that is now shown by Hillary Clinton, signing common documents with other States and putting the Internet Bill of Rights in the world agenda) is dropping out. Today, the Italian government and the majority come up with censorial proposals that isolate the country and drive it to the logic of authoritarian countries.
English version of the article Una costituzione per il web, in La Repubblica, 19 febbraio 2010, p. 38 .
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