[governance] Pakistan to ban shutdown Facebook.com for 24hrs as

[Bertrand de La Chapelle]

Just a brief remark :

Some actors probably draw a mistaken analogy between newspapers and web
sites. Under certain conditions (established according to more or less
transparent national legal processes), newspapers can be prevented from
being distributed in a given country because of one specific content in it
deemed illegal. The rationale is that it is not possible to separate the
illegal content from the rest of the paper (unless there is a new printing
without the said content).

In the case of web sites, and particularly of very very large user-generated
content platforms, it is technically possible to prevent access to a
specific content without banning the entire site, and to issue a "notice and
take down" if the site is based in the country. Therefore, a different logic
can apply.

One question remains : can there/should there be any "notice and take down"
framework for content posted in a country that is illegal in another
(remember the Yahoo auction case back in 1995, I think) ?

More generally, this is the common issue : "what are the globally applicable
public policy principles applicable to globally hosted content" ?

A key issue in the Governance of social Media IGF thread. Can the example
above (irrespective of the name of the specific country, to respect IGF's
rules of engagement) be analysed in more detail during the Vilnius IGF ?

Best

Bertrand







On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 8:55 PM, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:

> Notice that the advocates of a ban equate an action by a Facebook user with
> an action by Facebook itself. How do we drive home the notion of
> user-generated content and the idea of placing responsibility on the
> endpoints to non-internet users, or would that make any difference? That an
> objection to one page does not require a ban on an entire site.
>
> --MM
> ________________________________________
> >A Pakistani court has issued a ban on the social networking site
> >Facebook after a user-generated contest page encourged members to
> > post caricatures of Prophet Mohammed.
> >
> >The Lahore High Court on Wednesday instructed the Pakistani
> >Telecommunications Authority (PTA) to ban the site after the Islamic
> >Lawyers Movement complained that a page called “Draw Mohammed Day” is
> >blasphemous.
>
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-- 
____________________
Bertrand de La Chapelle
Délégué Spécial pour la Société de l'Information / Special Envoy for the
Information Society
Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et Européennes/ French Ministry of Foreign
and European Affairs
Tel : +33 (0)6 11 88 33 32

"Le plus beau métier des hommes, c'est d'unir les hommes" Antoine de Saint
Exupéry
("there is no greater mission for humans than uniting humans")
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