 You are listening to the podcast of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. We report on the leading role that new technologies play in the context of the Global Information Society, interviewing academics and industry leaders. Rebecca McKinnon, you are a person with one foot in journalism and another foot in academia. How did you get there where you are right now? Was that a sort of choice to do both? Well, it was a long process. It's sort of a long answer. I worked for CNN for 12 years. I was in China for nine years and in Japan for three years. And in 2004, I just went on leave from my job at CNN. I thought it would just be a semester to spend some time as a fellow at Harvard. And I just became very fascinated with what was happening on the internet at that time in 2004 with citizen journalism and blogging really emerging and having real impact challenging both conventional media and governments and sort of political power and so on. And I was very interested to follow that more, particularly on the international side. And I had spent a lot of time in China, so I was very interested to see what was happening with the internet in China. So for a lot of reasons that we probably don't have time to go into, I was also getting a bit frustrated with my job at CNN, feeling that there was less and less opportunity to do in-depth journalism there. So I thought it was a good time to, you know, explore other things. So I ended up staying at Harvard for three years, mainly at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and began to do research on the Chinese internet, on free expression issues, the role of corporations in censorship and surveillance. And also was also kind of an NGO activist at the same time. I started Global Voices, which is a citizen media platform and community, which I'm still somewhat involved with. And then I went to Hong Kong for a couple of years to teach and then sort of did some more independent research. And now I'm sort of got one foot in policy, one foot in journalism, maybe a third foot in academia or something. So I'm not really a traditional academic in any kind of sense, but I found that I wasn't able to do the kind of work that I wanted to do if I stayed at a traditional news organization. And that I wanted to get more in depth both in terms of research, but I also had a point of view that I thought, you know, I couldn't be neutral, I guess I had to say. I had to take a more advocacy stance. And so for those reasons, I sort of moved away from mainstream journalism. So do you think the Internet makes it easier to shift and reinterpret one's role? Is it easier to sort of do policy, academic work and journalism at the same time? To some extent, I think that's true. I mean, certainly with the Internet, it's possible to kind of develop credibility just as yourself. So I think in the pre-Internet world, Rebecca McKinnon without an institution would not have much legitimacy or credibility. But I would have to have a university or a brand media or something where people are like, who are you? You know, why should we listen to you? But I think because of the Internet, people find my writing, they see my work. I'm more sort of kind of an individual player and I've been switching institutional affiliations quite frequently. On the other hand, it's certainly, you know, just on a more practical level for young people starting out, just, you know, kind of word of warning and all of this, it also leads to a lot less job security. So I'm currently, I have a fellowship right now. It ends in August. I have no idea how I will pay my rent after that. So I go from year to year or, you know, contract to contract without any particular long-term stability. So that's the case for people who seem to think that they have long-term employment. So in this age, I think, you know, we kind of create our own platforms and we're constantly having to be entrepreneurial also to figure out how do I support the work I'm going to do, both institutionally and just, you know, much more practically. Now there is one issue I wanted to get into and that is the relationship between private and public censorship, sort of governmental and corporate censorship. You've been working on that. How do you see the interplay between the two? Yeah, yeah. Well, the interplay can vary and is sometimes very blatant and sometimes quite subtle, sort of depending on where it's taking place. On the country? And, you know, and also sometimes companies conduct censorship for their own reasons. So in a place like China, of course, you have the most kind of blatant situation where the government expects companies to take responsibility for the political behavior of their users and if the users are using their platform to conduct political activities that the government does not want happening, the company can potentially lose its business license if they're not quick enough to address this problem. And so the censorship is quite direct. But there are many other situations, for instance, Apple. Apple Computer with its iPhone apps and iPad apps and so on. It will do kind of both. So for instance, it's App Store in China. They, at the Chinese government demand, they censor many apps, you know, the Dalai Lama app, you know, anything that might be politically controversial and prevent them from doing business in China. But they also conduct a lot of their censorship just of their own volition. So for instance, Staring Magazine was, their app was censored, their political cartoons in the United States that are censored by Apple just because the company is afraid of controversy. So is it preemptive censorship? It's basically preemptive censorship. They're trying to enforce a certain environment or set of values. And you also have different, so for instance, in more indirect ways, for instance, Facebook requires that its users register with their real names. And while it's not enforced consistently, you can lose your account if you are reported to not be using your real name. And so that's kind of, in effect, ends up being a kind of censorship on people who are too vulnerable to be using their real identities. Right. The intention, however, is to create a pleasant environment and, you know, prevent children from being harassed and make it easy to try to encourage accountable behavior. And also, I think, prevent liability for the company. And it's also much easier to commercialize the service if people are using their real names. So there are a lot of commercial reasons why companies end up censoring or preventing certain applications or just kind of constraining certain kinds of applications which are not their preferred business partners and giving preference to some things over another, which may be for commercial reasons, but it ends up having an effect on freedom of expression and freedom of assembly as well as more and more people are reliant on these. So the two sometimes combine in a very direct way. Sometimes they combine in a more indirect way. And again, the issue is how does the citizen navigate all these things and hold the companies more accountable while still also holding governments accountable? I've been wondering, social networks such as Facebook, they seem to form a hybrid. On the one hand, one could say it's a commercial corporate space and why shouldn't Facebook be allowed to set the rules on its private premises? Right. So on the other hand, somebody recently said that they become similar to utilities, public utilities. So they seem to be in between and what we see from a free speech perspective. It's not really clear to what kind of rules they should actually respond. So we use public pressure to make them more like public entities that have to follow basic democratic rules but they probably think rather this as their private premise. Absolutely. They feel that they should not... their right to operate as a private business should not be interfered with. And there is a question about often, I think, whether legislation is the best way to address this problem or whether there needs to be some other kind of solution worked out that's kind of between the public, the users and the service that provides accountability and trust and ensures that the service is not operating in a manner that is curtailing people's rights. But we don't have good mechanisms for that. And part of the problem is, too, then you end up having legislation, some of which is quite good, but others of which end up constraining the innovation. And so we don't sort of have the right structures and mechanisms and institutions. What is your take on it? What do you think and what direction will it develop? I think that really depends on how much people get involved with us. How aware people become, how active people become in asserting really their netizenship of the internet. If people don't care about their physical city and who is running it and how they run it and they don't actively get involved with the civic life of the city, then they may perhaps have only themselves to blame if it's being run by people who are not running it very well. And so similarly with the internet, I think people increasingly need to assert netizenship within the internet. So one of the open questions would be the division of labor between social movements and governmental regulation. Is that how you would see it? That if there is enough social movement pushing for basic standards, then we don't need governmental intervention. Is that how you see it? Well, it's probably even more complicated than that because, you know, as the speaker after me, Mr. Mueller was talking about, it's more about governance rather than government. And it may be that governmental institutions as we've come to know them may not actually work so well in the internet age in a globally networked world. And so there's absolutely a role for governance but how that is exercised and how it works through corporate networks and whether that goes through, you know, elected public body or whether there's governance that's happening directly between the users and the company. I think there's going to have to be a lot of innovation worked out. I mean, you know, I think we're we're entering a period perhaps again as one of the other speakers mentioned perhaps the next hundred years ago where we're really going to have to be rethinking a lot of things fundamentally. So it means the way we have to imagine governance is sort of several triangles. Civil society, governments and corporations and civil society can push towards better rules towards governments but also can try to influence providers directly. Yeah, I think so. I think that's... So it's a mighty stakeholder approach but we don't know really how it will play out in what context and what country. Yeah, because of course, you know, we're not going for one world government here. You know, it's going to have to be a much more multi-layered thing but on the other hand, how do we ensure the public interest is served? We need to sort of push for democratic rights to ensure... Absolutely, yeah. We need to be involved with what our governments are doing and really try to understand the broader issues. So let me finish with a personal question. What do you think you will do next? What will be your next topic now that you've finished your book? Yeah, that's a good question. Well, one of the big issues that I see is that there's just not enough public awareness, I think, about many of the things that are happening, I think in part. That's just because the way the media is structured is kind of not part of the type of thing they normally cover. I think the internet governance battles that are happening is largely unreported. Yes, that's true. And so one of the things, and again, I'm not sure how I'm still figuring out kind of where to go practically, but find a way to provide better public information. So not only on an academic level, but how can we make... Whether it's an information platform that needs to be built or just kind of push for more coverage in different ways, how to build much broader public awareness and get more people involved in these discussions. Because I think the more that these discussions are happening amongst political and business elites and only academic elites in language that, you know, acronyms and so on that ordinary people don't understand, I think that's dangerous. So that would be the efficacy perspective. And in terms of research, do you have any ideas what you would like to do? Yeah, that's a good question. I'm going to have to sort of see going forward. I think a lot of it has to do, again, with how to sort of looking at this interface between where government power and corporate power intersect and finding ways to help people understand that better and to understand a little better how the two kinds of power interplay. I see a beautiful, comparative project here to look at how it happens in the US, how it happens in various European countries. That would be a very good thing to do. That would be very interesting. Yeah, absolutely.