Among the more absurd things ever said about the internet was that the network “interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it”. The epigram was half true, but the half that was false gets more important every year.
The internet can be a vile place, and the instinct to enforce some standards there is not misplaced. The director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, is quite right to say that crime online is as serious as crime offline. Even the Guardian, wedded to the idea of free speech, does not imagine that this is an unrestrained freedom – only that the limits that the law should set are minimal and largely concerned with public order. But some limits must exist, and they must be enforced.
The questions are: who should set these limits and who then should police them? Both governments and private companies have a part to play, even if government action often takes the form of demanding that private companies execute government policies. It is here that Ms Saunders may have gone too far in her zeal to keep the web clean. The justification for government censorship is that some hate speech is an incitement to violence or a dangerous ratcheting of community tensions, whereas some – no matter how offensive – should be permitted by law, even if we are happy for private companies to act against it. Personal abuse, when it is not accompanied by threats of violence or worse, should not be the domain of the government. Courtesy and respect are vital but best enforced by the owners of web spaces.
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