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This chapter addresses how discourses around Internet freedom have served a variety of interests and ideologies. However, all of the various conceptions of Internet freedom have to be challenged in light of technological change. Traditional notions of Internet freedom are disconnected from actual technical, political, and market conditions. Internet freedom has a long history, but all incarnations center on the transmission and free flow of content, from John Perry Barlow's “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” and calls for freedom from regulation to the United States Department of State's Internet freedom foreign-policy campaign. Normative frameworks should adjust both to the realities of information control from private ordering and authoritarian power and the rising human rights challenges of cyber-physical systems.

This chapter traces the cloud of digital data back to the data centers that store them. For security reasons, a number of data centers are repurposed Cold War military bunkers, suggesting that a military rationale for a bunker, to defend an area of territory, has re-entered the realm of data. By dividing networks into logical zones of inside and outside, these security infrastructures raise the specter of attack from those that might be ‘outside’ to network society, such as Chinese hackers or Iranian cyberwarfare specialists. By revisiting Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology, this chapter further suggests that the specter of a disaster that the cloud continually raises also carries within it a temporality of a user’s imagined death. This temporality animates a recent series of digital preservation projects, such as the ‘Digital Genome’ time capsule, intended to survive the “death of the digital.”

This chapter examines the efforts of advanced-industrialized Western democratic states to promote internet freedom through the backing of several international policy summits and associated funding efforts for promoting freedom of expression, for global internet users, especially in closed repressive political systems. However, the recent leaking of key classified documents identifying unlawful global surveillance practices by both authoritarian and democratic states, has further galvanized global attention towards the credibility and meaning of “internet freedom promotion.” In order to better understand what the promotion of Internet freedom entails and to unpack the complex international political economy of this global arena of policy entrepreneurship, this chapter critically examines the key stakeholders that have define and consolidate the norms and frameworks surrounding the shared global digital commons that have been used by protest movements and democracy promoters during all of the recent waves of transnational political mobilizations, including the Green Revolution, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street. The chapter argue that future investigations should discard reductive frames of analysis like ‘cyber-optimism” and “cyber-dystopianism,” and instead pay more critical attention on the key tech-savvy “communities of practice” that have emerged with a pragmatic focus on overseeing and infusing democratic norms into esoteric telecommunications policy.

The state of Turkey’s national media under the new regime, curbed in independence far in excess of typical media capture, having allegedly been ‘re-engineered’, with whole media outlets taken over by the government through moot uses of public authority and public resources from 2007, is narrated in this chapter. The chapter describes the hitherto unseen government pressure on the media, with scores of dissident journalists rendered jobless, and those more openly critical incarcerated and put on trial on flimsy charges. The discussion includes a description of some of the pro-government media practices—unprecedented, astounding, and simply incomprehensible by even the lowest standards of media ethics, such as a fabricated interview with Chomsky printed in headline in the pro-government flagship daily in 2013, purportedly communicating Chomsky’s support to Erdogan’s conspiratorial vision of international politics. The discussion also looks into the increasing government control of the Internet access and social media.

The uses and abuses of the Internet are discussed in some detail. Hilary Clinton is quoted saying that the US is committed to help promote Internet freedom. The top ten uses of the Internet (a subjective list) is enumerated. The list of abuses includes the Democratic Convention hacking in 2016, that of a French broadcasting corporation, and threatening emails in the UK to political opponents. Fraud and blackmail are widespread. Cybercrime is mentioned in a more general context and the statistic showing that in the year 2018 about 91,000 cybercrimes were committed in the UK is given. Techniques of encryption are described. Censorship of the Internet in Russia is reviewed.