Internet Press Freedom Conference

Overview of Internet News
What Is It, How Does It Travel and How Censors Repress It?

By Sean J. Alfano

New York City, June 30, 2003 -- The heads of digital operations from Dow Jones and Co., The New York Times and the Washington Post began the first full day of the “Press Freedom on the Internet” conference Friday with an overview of how Internet news is accessed and obstructed.

L. Gordon Crovitz, Senior Vice-President of Electronic Publishing for Dow Jones and Co., led the discussion along with Martin Nisenholtz, of The Times, and Christopher Schroeder, of the Post, who are both CEO’s of their respective organizations’ digital publications.

From left to right, L. Gordon Crovitz, Senior Vice-President of Electronic Publishing for Dow Jones & Co.; Christopher Schroeder, CEO and Publisher of Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, and Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of The New York Times Digital.

Crovitz described his presentation as focusing on “the nuts and bolts of how the Internet works.” By describing the basic framework of the Internet, Crovitz said people could understand “how it works in order to understand how governments can cause it not to work.”

He then unleashed a series of slides in order to demonstrate how information travels on the World Wide Web. The screen showed a picture of a person, followed by an Internet “cloud” and then a box titled “host.” The cloud represented the place where requests for information are made.

“What actually goes on inside this cloud determines what we can and cannot read and view online,” Crovitz said.

He explained that in most Western countries, difficulties accessing information stemmed from an overload of requests or problems with the online connection. However, he warned, “For people in many countries, that cloud blocks their access to news and information.”

Another diagram depicted the numerous networks that compose the Internet and the Internet Service Providers (ISP), such as AT&T and Sprint, through which users access the Internet. Crovitz described the process of finding and retrieving a news article from the Wall Street Journal and said this was possible because “a series of privately owned companies agreed to carry your requests to us and from us back to you.”

“That’s not true, of course, for the entire world,” he added.

He then displayed a chart showing what countries had Internet connections, with most coming from North American and Western Europe, and the least appearing in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

“The relatively low number of connections,” Crovitz said, “gives governments an opportunity for control that doesn’t exist in North America or Europe.”

In regions such as the Middle East, Crovitz warned that despite the high number of Internet users, the ISPs were usually government-owned.

“You can only access what your provider allows you to, “ he said. “If your only provider is the government, there’s a final and absolute arbiter over what you can look at.”

Ways a country could obstruct information requests online included wholesale and selective blocking of web addresses, a review of every customer’s Internet requests and legal threats to companies who provide news to countries who view the information as dangerous or unfavorable to its citizens.

Nisenholtz and Schroeder followed Crovitz’s presentation with statistics showing the popularity of their newspapers’ online editions. Nisenholtz said that more than 15 million viewers accessed The Times online each month, 20 percent of whom hail from outside the United States.

The Post, according to Schroeder, reached over 78 million people per year. Schroeder added the readers’ ability to have uninhibited access to news was the “difference between keeping up and being left behind.”

Early in his presentation, Crovitz cited the fourth article of the Statement of Vienna, a document devised by the Coordinating Committee of Press Freedom Organizations in November 2002, to define the lecture.

Crovitz read: “There are many forms of communication over the Internet, and it is important not to confuse them. News, for example, is different from such things as pornography, pedophilia, fraud, conspiracy for terrorism, incitement to violence, hate speech, etc., although there may be news stories about such problems.”

The fourth article ends with the acknowledgment that speech separate from news, which is deemed criminal, can be prosecuted in the country in which it originated.

Expressing a sentiment popular with journalists who feel current laws applicable to print and broadcast media should suffice for the Internet as well, Crovitz summarized the above statement.

“In other words, no new legislation or international treaties are needed when it comes to news on the Internet.”