Rebecca MacKinnon Quotes

As the web becomes more and more of a part of our every day lives, it would be a horrible tragedy if it was locked up inside of companies and proprietary software.

Increasingly, I'm finding myself uncomfortable about how the Internet's developing, who's influencing its development, and who is not.

The public should have access to unfettered communication and commerce, and the Internet is increasingly the medium where that takes place.

We need a multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance, not vested interests in making citizens pay for formerly free services or restrictions to their capacity to share information.

Information technology is a formidable enabler of freedoms. For example, it lowers barriers to freedom of expression and allows people to get a better grasp of their lives. It should not be used to reduce the freedom of people.

The Tunisian blogger and activist Sami Ben Gharbia has written passionately about how U.S. government involvement in grassroots digital spaces can endanger those who are already vulnerable to accusations by nasty regimes of acting as foreign agents.

The world's urban poor and the illiterate are going to be increasingly disadvantaged and are in danger of being left behind. The web has added a new dimension to the gap between the first world and the developing world. We have to start talking about a human right to connect.

Countries like Iran and China support an Internet Iron Curtain that would censor political dissidents and deny anonymous activity online through mandatory registrations of IP addresses.

The Internet has been seen in the West as the quintessential expression of the free exchange of ideas and information, untrammeled by government interference and increasingly global in reach. But the Chinese government has shown that the Internet can be successfully filtered and controlled.

The early idealists and companies and governments have all assumed that the Internet will bring freedom. Yet China proves that this is not the case.

The Internet has exceeded our collective expectations as a revolutionary spring of information, news, and ideas. It is essential that we keep that spring flowing. We must not thwart the Internet's availability by taxing access to it.

Allowing a handful of broadband carriers to determine what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the features that have made the Internet such a success, and could permanently compromise the Internet as a platform for the free exchange of information, commerce, and ideas.

We've seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we're seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world.

There's a real contradiction that's difficult to explain to the West and the outside world about China and about the Internet.

The whole, 'Is the Internet a good thing or a bad thing'? We're done with that. It's just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good - that's the really big challenge.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo should be developing new technologies to bypass government sensors and barriers to the Internet; but instead, they agreed to guard the gates themselves.

It is important to distinguish between the power of the Internet to make the great change it can, and the limits and vulnerabilities of that change without real-time political mobilization deployed globally to protect those who venture out, especially in closed societies, into the heady new vistas it offers.

It is time the international community took a stand on Egypt's repeated violations of press freedom and the rights of Internet users…the United Nations should respond by disqualifying Egypt from hosting an Internet Governance Forum in 2009.

To uphold state security China like many other countries of the world has placed some restrictions on the Internet to protect the freedom of the majority of the people.

Today, the Chinese government blocks websites and search results with the so called Great Firewall, an army of censors deletes articles and comments deemed politically sensitive, and legions of government-sponsored Internet users steer online sentiment in the government’s favor by posting pro-Communist Party and nationalist comments in discussion forums.

I don't care how sacred is freedom, but I think the time has come for governments, at least the Malaysian government, to censor the Internet.

Because of network neutrality rules, activists can turn to the Internet to bypass the discrimination of mainstream cable, broadcast, and print outlets as we organize for change.

Political oppositionary activity on the Russian Internet caused the government to pass laws limiting both service operators and users. As a result, the Russian tech environment became much less liberal, losing freedom as one of its competitive advantages.

We all have an interest in an open Internet.

A lot of people need technology to survive. And if you're renting it and you don't own it or have control over it, you're at the mercy of whoever does.