The rise of internet nationalism

Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 27
1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

In the last few years something nasty has been emerging. I first encountered it when trying to watch a video on one of the YouTube-like sites. No doubt something in some way related to robots. Instead of the expected lo-fi stream of pixels and sound I received a message, saying something to the effect that "this content is not available in your country". This is what I've come to describe as internet nationalism. It's really a sort of censorship or prejudice, based upon the locality where people by pure accident of chance happen to have been born. Someone somewhere decided that for some contrived reason that people living within a particular administrative zone of planet Earth are not worthy of participation. They're digital persona non grata.

Though only applying in a small minority of situations this sort of blocking of information has been increasing, and if it remained confined to video that would be not much more than an annoyance. But now the phenomena of internet nationalism is beginning to hit closer to home, with the veteran software development site Sourceforge blocking developers from participation based upon their country of origin. I've been writing open source software for long enough to know that there may be many reasons why you might want to exclude someone from a project. Maybe they're lousy coders. Perhaps they're spamming the forum. Or they might just be poisonous people, out to cause mayhem. But excluding someone based on their nationality - a factor which the majority of people have absolutely no control over - just seems wrong. It would be similarly trivial if they were to be excluded based upon their skin colour, gender or sexual orientation.



The US export regulations have been around for a long time. I remember reading about them in the 1990s as part of the end user licence agreement that comes with Microsoft Windows. In the olden days, when software was something in a shrink wrapped box made by a particular company, the notion of export made some kind of sense. But open source development is quite a different animal. The software may be developed in multiple locations around the world and the location in which the code or binaries are uploaded to and downloaded from could be anywhere, often with multiple mirrored data sets. In the internet era the notion of software being "exported" across national borders seems rather irrelevant.



Since the regulations have been around for so long, and it's debatable whether they even apply to open source software, why have Sourceforge waited at least since 2003 to start enforcing them? This suggests to me that US officials are beginning to apply political pressure to software organisations, which they didn't bother to previously. [In subsequent searching it appears that the pressure has come all the way from the very top].

Apparently the same restrictions also feature on Google Code, which means that US export controls apply to some of my own projects even though I'm neither a US company nor a US citizen. By agreeing to Google Code's terms of service I'm unwittingly participating in a discriminatory policy which goes against the principle of free software. This is obviously something that I don't want to do, so I'll be looking to transferring these projects to other hosts, such as LaunchPad, GitHub or Gitorious.