Corporate Anti Hero

InternetArtizan's writeup of the session at the e-campaigning forum on e-campaigning is rather better than my scrabbled liveblogging below. Indeed it's a rather neat summary of threats to our ability to campaign online

http://www.internetartizans.co.uk/ecampaigning_for_internet_freedom

The debate about whether this is something Greenpeace should engage in directly is barely out of the IT / New Media departments at Greenpeace, with some suggestions that we simply consider the web part of the Global Commons and therefore covered by our traditional remit to defend said commons. I'm perhaps slightly more pragmatic, and would say that the best way we defend the right to protest is by protesting, and the best way to defend free speech is by speaking and the best way to defend online campaigning will be by doing it.

I can see a potential hiccup in my approach as it is possible to envisage repression on the internet in the form of a switch in a large corporation, and once they introduce mechanism x it may be too late to protest about it.

Or rather, it would be too late to protest about it online. We'd have to do all the traditional stuff instead.