Recorded on September 30, 2020.

About the Event

For years the United States has been the champion of a borderless and largely unregulated Internet. China, by contrast, has promoted “Internet sovereignty,” which means governments should regulate Internet traffic much as they would physical traffic crossing their national borders.  Rebecca MacKinnon, an Internet policy expert and advocate for governing the Internet according to international human rights standards, says the U.S. government’s recent moves to ban two leading Chinese-owned apps, TikTok and We Chat, and purge Chinese companies like Huawei from American networks are simply another version of “Internet sovereignty,” and will do little to protect the human rights of Internet users in the United States or around the world.   

About the Speaker

Rebecca MacKinnon is founding director of Ranking Digital Rights (RDR), a research program at New America that sets global standards for corporate respect for freedom of expression and privacy online. The RDR Corporate Accountability Index ranks the world’s most powerful internet, mobile, and telecommunications companies on relevant commitments and policies, based on international human rights standards.  A 2019-2020 University of California Free Speech and Civic Engagement Fellow and author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (2012), MacKinnon is co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices, serves on the Board of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists and is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative. Previously, she was CNN’s Bureau Chief and correspondent in China and Japan between 1998-2004. She has taught at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Pennsylvania, and held fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, and the Open Society Foundations.