Rebecca MacKinnon
Rebecca MacKinnon
Rebecca MacKinnonis an author, researcher, Internet freedom advocate, and co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices Online. She is notable as a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo. She is on the Board of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative and is currently director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth16 September 1969
CountryUnited States of America
I lived in China for 9 years straight. I saw how my Chinese friends benefited and gained much more freedom to determine the course of their lives, their jobs, their creative works, and their identities over the course of a decade. Much of this increased freedom is thanks to economic engagement by the West.
After the non-Japanese Carlos Ghosn was brought in by Nissan to turn around the struggling auto manufacturer, he made English the company's official working language.
If you just technically adhere to the law, sometimes that's enough, sometimes it's not; it's really hard to predict. There is definitely a possibility that the Chinese authorities won't find it sufficient.
In the wake of the Internet getting shut down in Egypt - something that also happened in Xinjiang - I know that there are groups working on ways to help people get online when domestic networks get shut down. This could also be of use to some people in China.
In the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks.
In the future, 'the networked' will sometimes form alliances with the Silicon Valley companies against Congress, but sometimes we are going to want and need to target our campaigns for change at the companies themselves.
In the Internet age, it is inevitable that corporations and government agencies will have access to detailed information about people's lives.
In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet and directly censor websites.
Governments clash with each other over who should control the co-ordination of the Internet's infrastructure and critical resources.
Google transformed the way most of us get our information with a search engine that enables us to find citizen-created media content alongside the work of professionals.
Google's entire business model and its planning for the future are banking on an open and free Internet. And it will not succeed if the Internet becomes overly balkanized.
Google attempted to run a search engine in China, and they ended up giving up.
If high-tech companies are serious about doing the right thing, they can join together and lobby for more transparency and accountability in the way in which Chinese officialdom deals with Internet services.
I don't think there's any serious discussion inside the Chinese government about liberalising. I don't think anything's going to change in China until enough Chinese say, 'We're not going to play this game any more.'