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 Freedom-  restrictive  legislation

Although governments enact legislation in order to protect consumer privacy on the Internet, 

some individuals and organisations believe that legislation may also be too restrictive. In the 

UK, a new Telecommunications Act and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIP) took 

several years to enact since it involved giving security forces the ability to monitor all com-

munications passing through ISPs. This was fiercely contested due to cost burdens placed on 

infrastructure providers and in particular ISPs, and of course many citizens and employees 

were not happy about being monitored either!

Freedom House (

www.freedomhouse.org

) is a human rights organisation created to 

reduce censorship. It notes in a report (Freedom House, 2000) that governments in many 

countries, both developed and developing, are increasingly censoring online content. Only 

69 of the countries studied have completely free media, while 51 have partly free media and 

66 countries suffer heavy government censorship. Censorship methods include implement-

ing licensing and regulation laws, applying existing print and broadcast restrictions to the 

Internet, filtering content and direct censoring after dissemination. In Asia and the Middle 

East, governments frequently cite protection of morality and local values as reasons for cen-

sorship. Even the US government tried to control access to certain Internet sites with the 

Communications Decency Act in 1996, but this was unsuccessful. Refer to Activity 4.4 to 

discuss these issues.

Activity 4.4

Government and company monitoring of electronic communications