viernes, 5 de diciembre de 2008

Democracia, poder y medios de comunicación

Si alguno de ustedes aún tiene interés en la relación democracia y medios de comunicación, y desde la perspectiva que se abordó durante el curso, en este libro podrán encontrar un análisis más profundo de los temas de clase y otros más.

martes, 2 de diciembre de 2008

Nueva iniciativa sobre medios de comunicación

El coordinador del PRI en el Senado, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, presentó el día de hoy una iniciativa de reforma a la Ley Federal de Radio, Televisión y Cinematografía, para que los empresarios de la radio y la televisión puedan prorrogar sus concesiones, en una o más ocasiones, por plazos de hasta 20 años. La idea, según la propia iniciativa, es eliminar la incertidumbre jurídica y legislar los criterios señalados por la SCJN respecto la prorroga de las concesiones. Aquí pueden encontrar el texto de la iniciativa.

Más sobre la censura en Internet

Encuentro en el último magazine de The New York Times otro interesante estudio sobre las posibilidades de controlar los contenidos que circulan por Internet. Este documento, escrito por un profesor de derecho de George Washington University, se enfoca en el dominio de Google y los avances jurídicos para menguar las posibilidades de censura en Internet -como la iniciativa presentada el 6 de febrero de 2006 en la Casa de Representantes de los Estados Unidos: Global Online Freedom Act. Aquí un fragmento:

Today the Web might seem like a free-speech panacea: it has given anyone with Internet access the potential to reach a global audience. But though technology enthusiasts often celebrate the raucous explosion of Web speech, there is less focus on how the Internet is actually regulated, and by whom. As more and more speech migrates online, to blogs and social-networking sites and the like, the ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even eBay.

The most powerful and protean of these Internet gatekeepers is, of course, Google. With control of 63 percent of the world’s Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, Google has enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. As an acknowledgment of its power, Google has given Nicole Wong a central role in the company’s decision-making process about what controversial user-generated content goes down or stays up on YouTube and other applications owned by Google, including Blogger, the blog site; Picasa, the photo-sharing site; and Orkut, the social networking site. Wong and her colleagues also oversee Google’s search engine: they decide what controversial material does and doesn’t appear on the local search engines that Google maintains in many countries in the world, as well as on Google.com. As a result, Wong and her colleagues arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.

In response to the rise of online gatekeepers like Wong, some House Democrats and Republicans have introduced a bipartisan bill called the Global Online Freedom Act, which would require that Internet companies disclose to a newly created office in the State Department all material filtered in response to demands by foreign governments. Google and other leading Internet companies have sought modifications to the bill, arguing that, without the flexibility to negotiate (as Wong did with Turkey), they can’t protect the safety of local employees and that they may get kicked out of repressive countries, where they believe even a restricted version of their services does more good than harm. For the past two years, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, along with other international Internet companies, have been meeting regularly with human rights and civil-liberties advocacy groups to agree on voluntary standards for resisting worldwide censorship requests. At the end of last month, the Internet companies and the advocacy groups announced the Global Network Initiative, a series of principles for protecting global free expression and privacy.