A top legal advisor to President Joe Biden argued that the Chinese Communist Party’s approach to internet censorship was “largely correct,” insisting that the U.S. “government must play a large role” in the “monitoring and speech control” on Big Tech platforms. Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith, tapped for the president’s exploratory commission on reforming the U.S. Supreme Court, argued in an August 2020 Atlantic op-ed that “in the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.” Throughout the piece, Goldsmith calls for the U.S. government to play a more active
The genius of the internet has always been its openness: anyone with a smartphone or a laptop can take part in a worldwide conversation. For authoritarian regimes, however, that very openness is instead a problem to be solved. China’s plan could lock down the internet forever. At the heart of the internet is a communications protocol called TCP/IP. The creators of TCP/IP in the 1970s could never have imagined that it would someday form the backbone for nearly all commerce and social discourse by the year 2020. That backbone is beginning to show its age as millions of new smartphones