Sachs, Gore and 'networked democracy'

Update 18 May: Just seen two links that back up my question to Jeffrey Sachs at the BBC Reith Lecture (see extended post below) on whether we're defending the open structure of the internet as robustly as we should be

First, Al Gore on 'networked democracy' and its potential to revitalise the American republic:

The Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason.

But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet.

The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

And secondly, the BBC on how 'global net censorship is growing'

The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering. Websites and services such as Skype and Google Maps were blocked, it said.

Such "state-mandated net filtering" was only being carried out in "a couple" of states in 2002, one researcher said. "In five years we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated net filtering to 25," said John Palfrey, at Harvard Law School.

Glad to see that my Edinburgh question to Professor Jeffrey Sachs', this year's BBC Reith Lecturer, made it to the final cut - not just in audio and  video (I'm about 49:34) but also - and hugely helpfully - in transcript form, pasted below. I'm something of a convert to Sachs' combination of technocratic practicality and table-thumping moralism around the issues of poverty and climate-change. My question won't be unfamiliar to Play Ethic watchers:

PAT KANE: Hi. Jeffrey, you've talked about open source global co-operation and you gave two examples of those kinds of information networks - Wikipedia and open source but also things like email, blogging etc, which are crucial to this new mass decentralised political awareness that you invoke, that you think is so necessary, I mean how we will form this global citizenship is through these means. But are you aware of how vulnerable these networks are to vested interests, whether they're government interests, commercial or corporate, who would seek to reduce that openness? I mean I think the most obvious example are the restrictions that Western search engines agree to in places like China. Do you have any ideas about how to defend not just the open structures but the open values of the net?

JEFFREY SACHS: Well that's a great question. I think we are in a period, fortunately, where the technologies are running ahead of the would-be controllers, and while China and others block internet sites, new ones pop up a lot faster than they can be blocked. What my colleagues in science, and one of the colleagues that I revere in science, down the block from me, Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, has done, is champion public access for all scientific information, in what's called public library of science. And he is taking that on, and has turned the publishing world upside down in a way by massively increasing the free availability of this vital knowledge for the world. You're right that we have to watch out in these values. We have to protect that, we have to defend it, but fortunately the technology is giving us a huge push forward, and I think we can keep ahead on this one.