Net Freedom in the Baltics 

by Niall McKay

Wired News, 7:22 p.m. 16.Nov.98.PST 

Halfway between Talinn, Estonia, and Riga, Latvia, a
delegation from the Electronic Freedom Foundation
recently pulled off the highway, following the sign
toward a government-sponsored Internet café.

Outside, it looked like an average, albeit
isolated, Estonian farmhouse. Inside, farmers,
housewives, and school children accessed email,
surfed the Web, and played games on half a dozen
personal computers.

"It was really a time warp," said Alexander Fowler,
the EFF's director of public affairs. "You're in
the middle of rural Estonia. But when you poke your
head inside, you see the country's future."

Estonia's Net cafés represent what it and its
former communist neighbors are doing to encourage a
digital economy. The governments invited the EFF to
present a report on "Information Society Policy in
the Baltics" on Sunday.

"When we embarked on the report, we were the
victims of our own prejudice," Fowler said. "We
expected the Baltic's communist past would have
influenced or limited Internet freedom."

What they found was the opposite. The Baltic states
have neither restrictions on Internet content nor
restrictions on the use of encryption technology.

"In Latvia, we have excellent Internet policy,"
said Rasa Smite, a new-media artist based in the
Riga. "We have no Internet policy."

The EFF generally concurred. Its only
recommendation was for greater organization to
facilitate a growing digital economy.

"Since none of the Baltic States have any Internet
policy, we recommended they need to create Internet
user groups and Internet service provider
organizations," said EFF President Barry
Steinhardt. "Otherwise, the governments will be
forced to make policy decisions in a vacuum." A The
report, commissioned by the Open Society Institute,
also recommended that the Baltic states dismantle
their telecommunications monopolies.

The countries are reluctant to censor Internet
content because they do not want to do anything
that could damage a digital economy, according to
Steinhardt. Furthermore, all three states are
hoping to gain some form of European Union
membership and are moving to adopt the EU's Net
policy, rather then growing their own.

Both Lithuania and Estonia have implemented
consumer-privacy legislation, according to David
Banisar, a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy
Information Center in Washington.

"I have talked to a number of the Baltic privacy
commissioners, and in all cases they were following
Finland and the EU in terms of the consumer-privacy
legislation," Banisar said.

The report recommended that the region adopt
legislation to regulate electronic piracy and
copyright infringement.

"The Baltics have inherited the old Soviet legal
system," said Steinhardt. "By and large, the Net is
a very new topic for lawyers and judges everywhere.
But it's especially new to the former Soviet
republics."


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