Harry Lewis, professor of computer science at Harvard University, has authored an interesting opinion piece on the current state of internet censorship. Broadly, Lewis identifies three sources of censorhip:

These problems are far from unique. Nor, as might be assumed, are they confined to Muslim, communist or non-democratic states — just look at the ongoing debate concerning state internet censorship in Australia! (The fact that this is even being seriously considered is troubling enough, let alone the prospect that it might actually be implemented.) Lewis presents a cogent summary of the major issues with characteristic eloquence, drawing on numerous examples from Myanmar, China and the United States’ 2008 presidential election:

Copyright law is the new frontier of censorship. In response to panic in the recording industry about music file sharing, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. The DMCA seems to have made hardly a dent in the sharing of songs and movies, but it has justified a nasty war between recording studios and the teenagers on whom the industry depends. Other parties are being dragged into the fight. The recording and motion-picture industries are pressuring colleges to screen everything that flows over their campus networks in order to stop the unauthorized delivery of copyrighted songs and movies to students’ rooms.

No one advocates breaking the law, but such screening is inconsistent with academic principles of open communication. Suppose some students were acquiring unauthorized photocopies of textbooks. Would any university respond by opening and inspecting every parcel delivered to a student’s room? And yet such pre-emptive antipiracy measures have become plausible, even on a grand scale. At the urging of the recording industry, the French government is making plans to inspect every Internet communication in the nation before delivery — even though France also affirms people’s basic right, as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to “receive and impart information and ideas through any media.” …

The Internet is different from publishing, in fact if not in theory. Were one publisher as dominant as Google or YouTube, its corporate judgments might have a very big impact on the free flow of ideas. And the DMCA protocol presents opportunities for the powerful to suppress speech by spurious invocation of copyright law. In the United States, the Internet is still the “most participatory form of mass speech yet developed,” as a federal judge, Stewart R. Dalzell, wrote in overturning an early Internet-censorship law. For the Internet to remain so, more legislation will be needed to guarantee its openness.

While I don’t necessarily agree with Lewis’ bare assertion that, for the internet to remain an outlet for free speech, ‘more legislation will be needed to guarantee its openness’, it seems clear that current laws and market conditions create considerable potential for abuse — by both private and public censors.