Week 2: Response to “Long Live the Web” and “The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud” – April Qiu

According to Long Live the Web, “web has an important concept that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere”. Web is based on egalitarian principles. However, there are threats to the Internet. For example, besides the well-known Great Wall, there’s a web wall in China. The Great Wall was used to defense the outside invader, but the web wall is to prevent domestic people from accessing to the world outside. This government action clearly compromises electronic human rights. Someone defends for the Chinese government that the web control does no harm to the society and the public in China could still have enough resources to explore on the Internet without accessing certain foreign websites. That is not true, as it is clear that “web technologies will flourish only if we protect eh medium’s basic principles”. The consequence of internet-restricting has already been seen in China. Due to lack of competition, some inferior web applications like Baidu are dominating the market. The users have to bear it, since they have no better choice to turn to. What’s more, some academic websites are banned from accessing, which seriously affects the academic freedom. The impacts of compromising human network rights is far more beyond the field of web application. The Web needs defending.

In the article “The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud”, Ingrid Burrington indicates that “there’s increasing international interest in data sovereignty”. It seems that the Web and the data on the internet are paid more and more attention by all the governments around the world. When politics involved, how we defend our electronic human rights to insure the development of web based on its principles becomes a big problem.

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