Should governments use more muscle to control what happens on the web?

'YES' says Emily Taylor, above, expert in internet law and governance, associate fellow of Chatham House and Oxford resident

‘Google knows more about you and me than the KGB, Stasi or Gestapo ever dreamed of”. So said the German newspaper Handelsblatt in 2010, before anyone had heard of Edward Snowden.
It’s not just Google – which controls more than 90 per cent of European search, owns YouTube, and probably runs your email. It’s Facebook, with its 860 million daily users; it’s Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr.
According to Ofcom, British people use social networks for 15 minutes of every online hour. Family life can seem like the Matrix – the bit where they’re in chairs, semi-conscious, silent, and plugged into the network.
We use these services for free because, well – we’re the product. Every “like”, every search term, every chat, tweet or update is used to generate advertising revenue. That’s why you get the creepy adverts showing you clothes you nearly bought on Boden or Amazon but didn’t.
The rules of the road are set by contract – you know, the thing you don’t read just before clicking “I agree”. The big internet providers – Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft – have the contractual power to access your data, share it with law enforcement and third parties (that’s advertisers). And if you don’t like what’s happened to your data you can sue those companies – but the contract says you’ll have to do that somewhere like California, under US laws. Does that sound fair to you? Do you trust these companies to do right, to safeguard your right to private and family life and correspondence?
Recent history shows we can’t trust them. Whether it’s the makers of flashlight apps, who give themselves the right to track you by GPS and take pictures on your phone, or Facebook conducting psychological experiments on millions of people to see if they can influence people’s mood (they can) or motivate them to vote in elections (they can) by manipulating their news feeds.
Individuals’ rights to privacy of family life and correspondence underpin a free society. We all enjoy the products the companies offer, and they enhance our online life. Let’s also make sure someone is watching over them, that their giant databases treat our information with the respect it deserves. Privacy safeguards need strengthening. Only governments have the power to pass laws, and take on big corporates.

'NO' says Peter Bushnell, above, Oxford software developer who created his own currency, Feathercoin

The question is not should the Government censor the Internet but can it? I am not going to paint a rosy liberal picture here or talk of freedom of speech. People already have all the freedom they need and I’ll explain how.
The technology available today gives a means to create a secure network on top of the internet that we know. One well known network is The Onion Router (TOR), which creates an anonymous peer-to-peer encrypted network. 
All things good and bad can be found there, people living under oppressive regimes can freely go there to share information but also it is where illegal trades in everything imaginable can take place.
As these networks are encrypted, you need to break the encryption to see inside. Even with all the processing power we have available in the world there are levels of encryption that all of that power would not be able to break before our sun burned out. It is simply not possible to censor the Internet. We imagine powerful governments should be in control of such a beast but fail to understand the technology involved.
The internet filtering we have in the UK has already been abused, not just by those who circumvent it but by those protecting their commercial interest. In December 2010 the Motion Picture Association (MPA) applied for an injunction to force BT to add NewzBin2 to their CleanFeed system, which was solely created to filter out images of child abuse and not to protect copyright.
NewzBin2 was an indexing service for UseNet. UseNet was born in 1980 was not a friendly place to find content, so NewzBin2 innovated a way to index content and make it searchable on the web. The problem was that some of the content was copyrighted and the MPA got their injunction and NewzBin2 was taken down. There are more incidents like this and in 2012 all UK internet service providers were ordered to block the The Pirate Bay. There are now several more sites that offer the service that NewzBin2 had and The Pirate Bay is as accessible as ever using one of the many proxy sites.
Those who know the technology can see the futility in censoring the Internet and we can see how commercial companies try to use filtering systems for their own perceived gains. Censoring the Internet gives the Government a new responsibility to protect us from material that it deems unfit, and it has already failed in this task.