Free­dom on the Net

The chal­lenge

The rights that we enjoy offline must also be pro­tect­ed online. Free­dom of opin­ion and the press, the right to pri­va­cy, free­dom of assem­bly and asso­ci­a­tion — these human rights are pro­tect­ed by inter­na­tion­al treaties — on-and offline — and form the basis of our free and demo­c­ra­t­ic order. Ide­al­ly, the inter­net offers the unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to exer­cise these rights in a glob­al­ly net­worked space. But many states use dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies to restrict rights, for exam­ple by estab­lish­ing sys­tems of mass sur­veil­lance, cen­sor­ing con­tent online or restrict­ing access to the internet.

Our approach

In order to record the devel­op­ment of free­dom on the inter­net, it must be mea­sured by means of some objec­tive scale. This includes con­tin­u­ous­ly observ­ing the most impor­tant deci­sions, events and devel­op­ments in Ger­many. We clas­si­fy these on the basis of a com­pre­hen­sive, com­par­a­tive, qual­i­ta­tive and glob­al­ly uni­form set of indi­ca­tors and eval­u­ate them in terms of their impact on free­dom online.

The result

The Wash­ing­ton-based NGO Free­dom House has been pub­lish­ing annu­al coun­try-spe­cif­ic reports since 2009, which deal with the level of use and free­dom of the inter­net in most states of the world. iRights.Lab is a long-stand­ing part­ner in this endeav­or, pro­duc­ing reports for Ger­many. In our 2018 report, we con­clud­ed that Ger­many improved by one per­cent­age point rel­a­tive to the pre­vi­ous year and scored a total of 19 points (0 = unre­strict­ed free­dom, 100 = not free).

More on this topic can be found at
https://irights-lab.de/freedomonthenet18/. (Ger­man)