DAVID: Given the Article 19
principle, it seems that you
should be very, very careful
about making exceptions to
this and creating limitations to
the concept of free speech.
The bar should be very high for
these kinds of limitations
if you're going to
go after them.
And it should be higher still
if what you're talking about
is building some kind of
mechanisms to do that into the
network itself, through
filtering and
these kinds of things.
It may be obvious to people
in this room why there's a
difference.
But I can tell you that the more
limitations that we put
on free speech in the Western
world, in the places where
free speech has been a bastion
of our societies, the more the
other countries that don't have
that look at it and they
say, aha, we're doing the same
thing as you and it's OK.
JOHN: Well, I just wanted to
pick up very quickly on
David's last point, which I
think is absolutely vital.
Which is, when we proselytize
around the world-- we, I mean
Western countries, proselytize
around the world--
be sure before you start
proselytizing and telling
other countries how to behave,
make sure you have your own
backyard in order.
And the American hysterical
response, whatever the rights
and wrongs of the case, to the
first WikiLeaks, the papers in
December, was manna from heaven
for the Russian and
Chinese leaderships.
And they seized on it.
JUSTINE: You might think,
why is Mumsnet here?
Well, we're a community
of parents.
We're 1.5 million of us, and
we thrive on the idea of
having a platform and a place
to exchange information and
ideas freely.
We are passionately in
favor of free speech.
We don't moderate heavily, and
it's part of our watch word.
But it would be ridiculous to
pretend that we think there
shouldn't be some
limits to free
expression on the internet.
And as parents, I think a lot of
our concerns center around
issues around child safety.
DAVID: But we do think
that accessibility to
information is key.
And where we see it being cut
off, we think it's important
to step in and do something to
try to remedy the situation.
Twitter was something that was
used in the Middle East to
great effect in some of
the demonstrations.
And of course when the internet
was shut down, or
Twitter, which itself was shut
down, we came up with
something with some other folks
around Speak To Tweet.
So you could actually
tweet through your
phone and so forth.
And those kinds of things,
applying a little creativity
and innovation to keep the
channels of information open
is a role that we can play and
we should do more of it.
JOHN: Mick, I'm slightly worried
by this assertion,
that seems to gain common
currency, that the internet is
a moral force for good.
Very good things, and academics
are looking at them
and with hindsight will produce,
I think, considered
verdicts on the extent to which
Twitter and Facebook and
others did engender or ride on
the wave of revolutionary work
in Tunisia, Egypt,
and elsewhere.
But obviously they had
a massive impact.
The internet is a thing.
It's a tool.
It's a medium in which those
using it, just as they in 1989
used the photocopy machine,
choose to use for moral good
or for moral ill.
DAVID: So if you think about in
the digital age, the trade
in the free flow of information
is every bit as
important to the international
economy and to national
economies as the trade
in commodities or
manufactured goods.
But yet if you look at the way
governments are able to
regulate it, it seems to run
afoul of traditional free
trade principles.
Forcing companies to have local
offices, there's a lot
of things that seem to
violate free trade.
And so if you could get free
expression into the free trade
discussion, you have a concrete
vehicle at least in
multilateral debates or in
bilateral debates where
countries that believe in free
expression can go to countries
that don't have such a
commitment and say, hey if you
want to trade with us, this has
to be on the agenda and we
have to have some kind of
discussion about it.
AUDIENCE: I wonder whether the
panel would comment on the
fact that we seem to
be going beyond.
I'm a lawyer, and we've
gone beyond the
constraints of the law.
I think this morning someone
said that technology has won.
And indeed it has.
We've got Iran where our
security services and those of
other friendly nations have been
handing out untraceable
mobile phones to activists.
We've got Egypt, where the
internet has effectively been
turned off and mobile
phones turned off.
We've got the censoring of
WikiLeaks through effectively
economic censorship by turning
off their money supply through
Visa, MasterCard, and
Paypal, and also
denial of service attacks.
So actually, what is happening
is that the states seem to be
resorting to extra
legal censorship.
And I think the challenge for
the future is how do we deal
with states who are behaving
in that way?
How do we regulate them?
DAVID: It's a search engine.
It's not the repository
of the web.
If you take a link off Google,
it's still on the web.
And someone can still easily
find it through another search
engine, or with an address, or
there's all kinds of ways to
find things.
JUSTINE: What we're saying is,
what duty is there for us to
try and protect an eight year
old, which is the average age
in this country that someone
first negotiates the internet,
from stumbling across images
that are potentially, and
material that is potentially
very damaging to them?
And I'm not saying that this
has to be something that
should be regulated.
I think we need to have an
intelligent conversation, and
that involves parents taking
some responsibility, getting a
bit more clued up.
But the fact is that parents
don't, on the whole, really
have a handle on this stuff.
They don't use Google
SafeSearch as
much as they should.
They don't download internet
safety stuff as
much as they should.
They are confused, bemused,
bewildered, and very often
their eight year old knows more
about this than they do.
DAVID: We are trying to do
things to help parents be
empowered here.
We've had SafeSearch
from the beginning.
And access to filters,
education.
We do a lot of things on YouTube
about safe use of the
internet and videos
and so forth.
And there's no question that
I'm sure we could do more.
And I don't think--
there's nothing that violates
free expression to put tools
in the hands of parents in order
to police what's going
on in their households.
And we could do more
to do that.
No question.
AUDIENCE: How can we prevent
the risk of passing from a
censorship of silence to
a censorship of noise?
How can we help people to be
skilled when accessing and
providing information online?
Thank you.
MICK: David?
DAVID: Wow.
I mean that's a tough one.
You heard Eric talking a little
bit earlier about us
being able to deliver
the info.
We're a search engine,
we're all
about ranking and relevance.
And it seems to me that the more
information there is, the
more challenging that gets.
And so we're trying to do a
better job of figuring out how
can we get you the
right answer.
We're also trying to figure
out ways to preserve high
quality content on the web.
And with YouTube, there's a
great opportunity for people
to start creating things that
are really super high-- you
don't need a whole studio.
You just need a Flipcam and some
talent, and you should be
able to get that information
out to people.
And then we have to figure out
ways for people to find it.
And I think there's a lot of--
there's still a long way to go
in search and discovery, and
using the social signals to say
that because we're going
to use your friends say it's
good, or the people you know
and trust say it's good.
So there we will incorporate
those signals.
And so all of that, I think,
will help us cut through this
cacophony and all
of this noise.
We still have a ways to go.
And it's a challenge,
but we have a lot of
people working on that.
And there are a lot of
people across the
industry working on that.
So I think it will get better.
MICK: Justine?
JUSTINE: I'd just like to bring
up at this point a very
well-respected blog that was
entitled the other day, "Why
Mumsnet Is Better Than Google."
And the thesis went
something like, what you need
to help you cut through all
the noise is a group of
like-minded people who you
trust to help you along and
navigate you along the way.
And that's why Mumsnet is
better than Google.
So I just said it again, why
Mumsnet is better than Google.
MICK: OK, well--
JOHN: [INAUDIBLE] plug.
MICK: I think actually what
you've done is introduce a
whole other session.
So on that note, I think
I'll wind it up.
Justine and David and
John, thank you
all very much indeed.
