Amidst Internet Crackdown, Turkey Hosts IGF 2014
This past March, the Turkish government generated global headlines over its decision to block access to Twitter and other social networking sites following allegations of corruption aimed at Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. While Turkey may be considered a global swing state in Internet governance, as a new Freedom House report highlights, its domestic policies have been surprisingly “one-sided” and “untransparent” in recent months, “as traditional punitive offline measures restricting freedom of speech have migrated more and more to the online sphere.” Clashes in the past fifteen months between the Turkish government and protesters — many of whom are young, tech-savvy Internet users who rely on the online tools to organize and communicate — have prompted the state to increase its control over communications networks, including the recent passage of a bill that gives the Turkish Telecommunications Directorate the authority to block any political content without a court’s permission. This backdrop of online censorship and government crackdowns made Turkey a particularly interesting host for the ninth annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF), for which I and OTI’s policy director Kevin Bankston traveled to Istanbul at the beginning of this month.
The IGF is the largest annual multistakeholder convening of Internet policymakers, bringing together government officials, company representatives, members of civil society, and academics to discuss critical issues related to Internet governance. Although much of the focus this year was on the implications of the global net neutrality debate, questions about government censorship and surveillance were also front and center — especially given recent events in countries like Turkey and Iraq as well as the ongoing fallout from the NSA surveillance leaks. Indeed, the past few years have led to increased scrutiny on the relationships between technology and telecom companies that hold troves of user data and governments that may seek to access or control that information for a variety of purposes.
Panel Rundown: “Transparency Reporting as a Tool for Internet Governance”
One natural consequence of this shift is a much greater emphasis on transparency, including the process of voluntary transparency reporting by companies (and some governments) to publicly disclose information about their practices and the types of requests for information that they receive. These transparency reports serve a wide variety of purposes in the United States, but they also have significance internationally — data from companies can, for example, shed light on foreign government attempts to block and censor content, as we’ve seen in Turkey in the past two years. At this year’s IGF, in addition to participating in a timely panel on “Privacy, Surveillance, and the Cloud: One Year Later,” Kevin Bankston led another session on “Transparency Reporting as a Tool for Internet Governance,” which explored the standards developing around transparency reporting by U.S. companies and examined how those standards can be internationalized and enforced.
Transparency reporting has evolved rapidly in the past few years. In 2010, Google became the first company to issue a transparency report, disclosing a large data set of government requests for information and takedown requests. In the next few years, a handful of other tech giants like Twitter and LinkedIn followed suit. But since the Snowden revelations began in June 2013, the practice has exploded, due to a combination of greater interest from the public in what information governments are asking for as well as a desire by companies to increase transparency in order to restore customer trust. Today, around 40 major Internet and telecommunications companies have released reports, including AT&T, Comcast, Dropbox, Microsoft, and Vodaphone.
As the first company to issue a transparency report, Google remains in many ways a model in terms of understanding the evolution of these disclosures as well as setting the standard for other companies to aspire to. During the IGF panel on transparency reporting, Google’s Marc Crandall described how Google has expanded and refined its transparency reporting practices over the years. Today, the company’s reports cover six broad categories of information: (1) user data requests from government agencies, (2) government requests for removal of content, (3) copyright removal requests, (4) traffic history patterns of services in different countries to help visualize disruptions in the free flow of information, (5) safe browsing data, including how many users see malware and phishing linked from search results as well as which networks around the world host malware sites, and (6) safer email reports which detail how much email sent between Google and external email providers is encrypted. These reports have been useful in a number of political contexts — including ongoing debates about reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and U.S. foreign intelligence surveillance laws — and may even have spurred better behavior from other companies, such as Comcast’s decision to start encrypting its email traffic in June 2014, just weeks after Google issued its safer email report.
Transparency reporting obligations shouldn’t just fall on companies, though. Both Susan Morgan from the Global Network Initiative and Patrick Hiselius from Teliasonera (and a representative of the Telecom Industry Dialogue) discussed the need for government reporting and accountability to complement the data that the companies are providing to the public. Governments alone can provide greater transparency about their practices, the legal interpretations they rely on, and the oversight mechanisms in place, and they are uniquely positioned to report on the total number of users in a particular country affected by requests. What’s more, they set the parameters for what companies can legally report on. Hiselius noted that there are a number of scenarios where government reporting is necessary to get the full picture, and argued that companies can and should encourage governments to be more transparent about their laws and practices.
In some cases, encouraging reporting from both governments and companies may expose critical discrepancies in accounts from different sources. Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, recounted several instances where the Indian government’s statements about government requests for data differed significantly from the information provided by private technology and telecom companies. And of course these reports do not capture behavior which Prakash described as “invisible censorship,” a term that refers to the increasingly common practice of voluntary takedowns and self-censorship by content providers based on their own terms of service or community guidelines.
Nonetheless, it’s clear that the growing trend of transparency reporting is increasingly important for accountability purposes. Wendy Seltzer, who appeared on the panel in her capacity as the founder of the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, described how transparency reports feed into governance by increasing visibility and allowing people to see how laws are being applied. One of the unique features of the Internet is that the user experience is shaped not only by the actions of law enforcement, but also largely by private enforcement and the choices made by intermediaries facing pressure from both governments and private actors. Juliana Nolasco from the Institute for Technology and Society in Rio de Janeiro explained the issue in the Brazilian context, where transparency reports have revealed the broadly censorious impact of that country’s expansive defamation laws.
Of course, the unprecedented growth in the number and types of reports in recent years also raises questions about how that information can be collected and standardized to create maximum value. Ryan Budish from the Berkman Center at Harvard University discussed his team’s research on transparency reports, explaining that the diversity of reporting is great in terms of innovation but makes it very difficult to compare across reports. The Berkman Center and OTI are currently working together to identify best practices from existing reports, with the goal of offering a framework to make it easier for companies to release transparency reports, and improving consistency across both new and existing reports to increase the value overall. A standardized transparency reporting toolkit would broaden the applicability and usability of the reports and make it easier for small companies and startups to begin issuing reports without having to reinvent the wheel each time. Given the location of the IGF, the question about whether these transparency reports are actually going to change governmental approaches to blocking and censorship inevitably came up. The answer, not surprisingly, is that transparency reporting alone likely will not prevent developments like Turkey’s latest online censorship legislation. But these reports are an important tool that can provide advocates with a baseline of information needed to hold governments and companies accountable, and can subsequently be used to promote broader policy changes.
Fighting for the Future of the Internet Governance Forum
Important discussions like these are one of the features that makes the IGF such an indispensable forum for international Internet policymaking. But the IGF’s current mandate is set to expire in 2015 (its original five-year mandate was renewed by the United Nation’s General Assembly in 2010), which made the uncertain future of the institution a key topic of conversation throughout the week and in broader debates about the evolution of the Internet governance system. OTI is pleased to have endorsed two statements produced during the conference which for an open-ended mandate for the IGF so that its processes can be reformed and strengthened in the coming years: one statement through the BestBits coalition on behalf of a broad group of civil society organizations, and another multistakeholder statement that reflects the views of a range of government officials, companies, non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions.
We are hopeful that the UN will recognize the importance of this critical convening and work with civil society and the private sector to lay the groundwork for a sustainable, productive IGF that continues to host these types of discussions for many years to come.
Watch the full video of “Transparency Reporting as a Tool for Internet Governance” or read the live transcript. The video for “Privacy, Surveillance, and the Cloud: One Year Later” is here. For more on OTI’s priorities prior to the 2014 Internet Governance Forum, read this article.
