March 12, 2010 was marked by Reporters Sans Frontières as World Day Against Cyber Censorship.
A few months ago, at the height of Typhoon Ketsana, Rep. Juan Miguel “Mikey” Arroyo proposed regulating the Internet in the Philippines – Facebook and blogs among others – as they are susceptible to abuses. We laugh and scoff at that idea because we think it’s impossible: either the Government lacks the technical skills necessary to control the medium, or that the Internet “cannot be controlled.” Yet if Ella Ganda and the Pangandaman-Dela Paz issues prove anything, it’s that the enemies of free expresssion do not need to respond to online dissent with online methods: that offline repression works perfectly as an apparatus to control the Internet, and to silence dissent.
If a segment of the Philippine blogosphere would be up-and-arms over the matter of comment moderation, then it should highlight how nuanced freedom of speech is. More than that, it should highlight how important those nuances are, and how important the whole is and should be. If the many small things we bicker about in the grand scheme of Internet usage – slow connectivity, blocked websites, cyberbullying, and so on and so forth – would add up to a profile of how the Internet in the Philippines works, then we are definitely anything but free.
