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The Possibilities Of The Internet
Gordon Brown delivered two important speeches earlier this month. On May 17, Britain's most famous Son of the Manse delivered a rumination on people power to the Church of Scotland General Assembly; two days later, he hailed the internet industry at the Google Zeitgeist Conference.
The internet was a major theme of both speeches. It's understandable, perhaps, that the PM is keen to draw attention to the internet. On May 15, US broadcaster CBS announced it was buying web publisher CNET for $1.8 billion - one of the few economic bright spots in a six-month spell of gloom and doom. But does Brown have an internet plan, or is he simply using the internet as a convenient metaphor for his vision of the world?
Speaking to churchmen in Scotland, Brown praised the internet's potential to reach beyond borders:
"Once we relied on just a lone missionary finding common ground with a few local people in an isolated community.
"Today modern means of communication like the internet enable millions of us to link up, debate and organise across frontiers - summoning the moral sense of communities to shape the way we run our world.
"Until a few years ago we would say to each other - 'if only people could speak to each other, could communicate across borders and boundaries, if only we could connect people would discover how much they had in common'.
"Now we are in a new world divided - yes - by vast distances of space but united by instant ties of cyberspace.
"A world without walls, borders, barriers and frontiers where we are neighbours not because we are on the same street but because we are on the same networks; meeting on Facebook if not face to face; sharing in the online world - the one continent that everyone can inhabit.
"So contrary to received wisdom, the greatest arsenal of power today is not nuclear or biological or chemical but people --- the discovery of our capacity to come together across borders and oceans and to stand together as one."
Combined with what he calls "the human urge to co-operate for justice", Brown claims that the information revolution can make possible "for the first time in history something we have only dreamt about: the creation of a truly global society."
This theme of borderless interdependence is one he has touched on before. It is unclear whether it has captured the imagination of Brown's fellow leaders, or indeed that of his British compatriots, who are increasingly concerned that "borderless" means "everyone move to Britain" and "interdependence" means "western citizens is going to have to pay for everything anyway."
He returned to the theme at his Google address, though the assembled business leaders there were more interested in getting a guarantee that businesses based in the UK would be subject to a "light regulatory touch", rather than Brown's waffle about borderless communication.
Brown said that governments should learn from the "open, unregulated" structures of the internet. Furthermore, government & business should make a positive, optimistic case for globalisation (with the internet as an example) and make more of how the internet "empowers" individuals and communities. He added in his conclusion that he looked forward to the development of a "global society" as a result of these measures, no doubt with Britain at its "hub" (if the PM is still on speaking terms with David Miliband). Addressing fears of web predators, Brown promised a "light touch" in regulation, but spoke of an "Internet Security Council" to protect children from the more dangerous reaches of the world wide web.
All marvellous stuff, no doubt, but it is difficult to square Brown's enthusiasm for the Internet with his government's plans to construct the world's largest ever surveillance project in order to keep an eye on it.
Only two days after the Google conference, and three after his internet-praising speech to the Scottish church, the Home Office announced it was studying proposals to log every email, internet session and telephone call made it Britain.
It would represent a technology building project of Death Star proportions.
The government has a very poor record on IT infrastructure projects, which perhaps explains why some commentators believe that the new plans won't go anywhere. 3 billion emails are sent every day; there were 57 billion text messages sent in Britain alone last year. Much of the nation logs onto the internet regularly at home or in the office. There simply aren't the resources to sift through all this information, even if another government IT program is introduced to identify and target suspicious messages. Or does Brown plan to outsource this labour? There's globalisation for you.
How seriously can we take government plans to store these details? How safe would they be, either from outside interference - or from the prying eyes of British officials, who might claims to use the database to fight terrorism but could soon be snooping on less serious crime?
So much for Brown's claim to make Britain the standard bearer for internet innovation: The world's most surveyed society is a more likely title.
