When I last visited Gdansk two decades ago, the independent Solidarity movement had just won a resounding victory in the communist world’s first free elections. Since then, I have seen Poland transformed into a prosperous democracy and I recently returned to speak at the All About Freedom festival addressing the meaning of freedom of expression in the Internet age. It is tempting to compare Solidarity with the evolution of the Internet. Just like Solidarity, the Internet has proven a powerful grass-roots force for freedom of expression. At a newly created Solidarity Museum, a room is devoted to the underground press that flourished under one party communist restrictions. Any future Internet museum will surely contain rooms about the power of bloggers uploading their own opinions around the world and videos taken by mobile phone and posted on YouTube in places like Iran. For much of the 1980s, the totalitarian regime in Poland attempted to crush Solidarity, declaring martial law and imprisoning its founder Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders. Today, it’s clear that certain governments are attempting to control their citizens by monitoring or censoring information on the Internet. We’re also seeing a general increase in the number of requests from democratic governments - for information about Internet users or for removal of information from Google’s index of the web. Some of these requests are legitimate and based in the rule of law and we honor them. In the interests of transparency, however, we recently launched an online Government Requests tool to show where these requests originate. Poland certainly values free expression. My colleague, Susan Pointer, is in Krakow this weekend, speaking in the ‘New Technologies for Democracy’ session at the High-Level Democracy Conference . She will be focusing on the important role that technology - and internet technology in particular - can play in facilitating communication, participation, transparency and accountability in decision-making across the world. In the end, Solidarity emerged victorious from its long struggle by sticking to its values of non-violence, free speech and multi-party democracy. Where governments try to crack down on the free exchange of ideas on the web, I believe the web’s innate openness will end up triumphing. Posted by William Echikson, Head of Communications South, East Europe, Middle East and Africa
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