Sanders is this election's
best advocate for internet freedom and access while Trump presents the largest
threat, a tech policy advocacy group finds
Bernie Sanders is far and away
the best presidential candidate for those who care about internet freedom and
access, the tech policy advocacy group Free Press Action Fund has found.
The Republican contenders
generally disdain internet freedom, the group discovered, and Donald Trump in
particular presents the most dire threat to a free and accessible internet this
election cycle.
"It is absolutely
essential that the Internet remain open and free of censorship or the chilling
effects that result in self-censorship," Sanders said as he argued against
the Protect IP Act (PIPA), a bill which would have "blacked out parts of
the internet," Free Press Action Fund noted in its "internet
voter" guide to
the candidates' positions.
In the group's comparison of
the 2016 candidates' platforms, Sanders comes out ahead of all others when it
comes to issues that internet activists prioritize: protecting free expression
online, fighting for affordable broadband access, working against cable
monopolies, supporting local broadband companies, battling against mass
surveillance, and supporting net neutrality.
The only category in which
Sanders scored less than a top score was encryption. In February, the Vermont
senator argued that
"a middle ground can be reached" in the FBI'sfight to
force Apple to break into one of the suspected San Bernardino shooters'
iPhones. No candidate received a top rating in this category.
Where Sanders scored well,
Trump scored abysmally. Trump believes, for example, that "the government
needs to shut down the internet to keep America safe," while
simultaneously claiming that "the FCC’s Net Neutrality protections are an
'attack on the internet' that would 'target conservative media,'" giving
him poor scores in the categories of internet freedom and net neutrality.
"We’ve been scouring the
transcripts of the debates produced by the networks that host them," Tim
Karr, senior director of strategy for Free Press Action Fund, explained to
theGuardian. "We’ve gone through the candidates’ websites to see if
there’s anything that relates to the issues in their campaign platforms, and
we’ve been bird-dogging."
"Indeed, the group’s
staffers have been attending stump speeches, rallies and other public events to
ask the specific policy questions that, across the board, the candidates don’t
seem prepared to answer," the Guardian noted.
In general, the most difficult
aspect of the analysis was confronting the candidates' ignorance of key tech
policy issues. The newspaper reported:
Simple ignorance is a problem
that crosses party lines, said Karr, and it’s an acute one in a country where
net neutrality and anti-surveillance activism have crossed those lines as well.
“We think that there’s a constituency out there, what we call the internet
voter, that has already demonstrated his or her passion on this issue,” Karr
said.
"More than 10 million
people got involved protesting the PIPA [the Preventing Real Online Threats to
Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act] and SOPA [the
Stop Online Piracy Act] legislation," he said.
"The candidates by and
large haven’t caught up with this new constituency."
The Republicans, in
particular, are "out of step" with their voting base, according to
Karr, who told the newspaper that the issue of net neutrality is one with
bipartisan support. Polls even show that a majority of Republican voters
support it, Karr said to the Guardian, and yet nearly every Republican
candidate has taken a stand against net neutrality on the campaign trail (John
Kasich's position on the issue is unknown).
"There’s a difference
between what these politicians are saying and what their voting base
believes," Karr lamented to the Guardian.
Clinton and Sanders are the
only presidential candidates who have argued in favor of net neutrality to
date.
Overall, the Republican
candidates scored very badly—but they also couldn't be ranked in some areas,
such as the issues of "industry consolidation" and "local
competition," suggesting that the Democratic candidates have been pushed
to take positions on issues that the Republicans have thus far been able to
continue to ignore.
Raising the alarm about the
ignorance of most of the 2016 candidates, Free Press Action Fund argues that
its concerns are extremely urgent. The group writes, "No other
communications medium in history has had such vast potential to help drive
social change and improve the lives of so many so quickly. And yet the
Internet’s benefits have not been evenly distributed. We need to ensure that
the Internet serves the public—and doesn’t harm communities by furthering
inequality or discrimination."
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