“The Internet Under Attack Is Civil Society Under Attack”, 7 Nov 2017

Grave concerns over the state of the Internet came into sharp focus...at Techonomy 2017...The panel... asked what obligations today’s tech giants—including Facebook, Amazon, and Google, and China’s Alibaba and Tencent, among others—owe to the rest of us to help make the web more transparent and secure...Such a breakdown...will pose a direct threat to those who in the past have been able to use the internet to challenge authority. “The Internet under attack is really civil society under attack,” MacKinnon said. [She] worries about the potential impact on the most vulnerable members of society, including human rights activists and marginalized groups especially in repressive countries, and questions whether security measures like identification requirements that might be imposed in more democratic places could only further endanger them. “The weaker civil society is in transitional places, the worse our security is going to be"... [I]t’s easy to blame the Internet giants, but government is equally or perhaps even more to blame for today’s frightening landscape of distrust and opacity.