We would all like to think that we have the freedom to say whatever we want, whether it’s out loud, published in a book, or written online. Normally, our speech is protected through the U.S. Constitution. As Americans, we are lucky; we have the Freedom of Speech. As long as it’s not “obscene,” no one has the right to censor what we say, right? This all may be changing. In the future, American speech might be just as limited as those in other countries.

In Blown to Bits, there are two stories that show a chilling example of what could be our future. In 2000, the magazine Barron’s published an article saying that Joseph Gutnik, an Australian businessman, was involved in tax evasion and money-laundering; since the article was available in Australia for a fee, Australian courts argued that it was effectively published in Australia, and so violated Australian laws. The magazine eventually had to issue an apology and pay $580,000 in fines and legal costs. Yahoo! also had an argument with a foreign country in 2000. Due to French laws prohibiting the sale and display of Nazi items, Yahoo! France was forced to remove Nazi paraphernalia from their online auctions, remove Nazi memorabilia photos from their website, and stop anti-Semitic hate speech on discussion groups. However, French citizens were still able to access all of this by finding their way onto the American Yahoo! website; learning about this, France demanded that all of the same material be removed from the American website, as well. Eventually, anti-hate speech was prohibited on Yahoo!, and most of the Nazi memorabilia disappeared (Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis, p.255-256).

Global access to the internet makes it extremely difficult to decide which countries laws are applied where, let alone which laws in general. How do you know if you’re breaking a foreign law, or if it applies to you? Will we have to begin to censor ourselves for other countries? How do you control the internet without taking away the rights of one (or more likely multiple) country’s people?