Tech giants have power to be political masters as well as our web ones

Among all the excited commentary about the role of social networking in the Arab spring, one uncomfortable fact stands out: internet censorship and surveillance are alive and then in Tunisia and Egypt. They're being orchestrated and supervised by different people, clearly, however the intermediaries implementing it are the same as previously: western research companies that are to all appearances prepared to sell filtering and surveillance kit to anyone with a government purchase order. And the result is the same as earlier: a webpage saying "Sorry: the page you requested does not exist". Except that some regimes exclude the apology.

The internet becomes more central to our lives

As the internet becomes more central to our lives, the power of the commercial companies that mediate citizens' interactions with one another and with the state increases with every passing day. The Arab spring appeared to be a case study of this, however we got a brief glimpse of it here while last year's outbreak of recreational looting, when the prime minister irritably flirted with the idea of shutting down social networks and the BlackBerry instant-messaging service. The thought that this might be an infringement of our civil rights doesn't seem to have crossed his mind.

It is, nevertheless, very much on the mind of Rebecca MacKinnon, a leading expert on internet censorship. She's best known for her work on Chinese internet regulation in which she demonstrated how an intelligent authoritarian regime can not only survive however thrive in the internet age with the help of domestic and multinational corporations. She has now widened her focus in a remarkable new book, Consent of the Networked, in which she airs her worries about "what will happen to the internet - and more broadly to the future of freedom in an internet age - if the world's democracies develop a habit of tackling problems in a shortsighted, kneejerk manner, without considering the long-term domestic and global consequences".

One of the central ideas in MacKinnon's book is the concept of what she calls "sovereigns of cyberspace", - companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon that now exercise the kinds of power that were hitherto reserved for real "sovereigns" - governments operating within national jurisdictions. Witness, for instance, the way in which Amazon arbitrarily removed Wikileaks from its cloud computing servers without any justification that would have withstood a First Amendment legal challenge ; or the way that Facebook took down a page used by Egyptian activists to co-ordinate protests on the grounds that they had violated the company's rules by not using their real names.

The powers to curtail people's freedom of speech thus were traditionally reserved for governments which - in democracies for the moment - theoretically derived their legitimacy from John Locke's notion of "the consent of the governed". The question MacKinnon raises is: in what sense do Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google enjoy the consent of the networked?

The lawyer's answer is that consent

The lawyer's answer is that consent was obtained by agreeing to the terms and conditions when people signed up. If you don't like the rules at the time you don't have to join. That might work in contract law - and truly was probably OK when these companies first opened for business. However it now looks a bit threadbare because of the way in which the platforms of cloud-based companies morphed imperceptibly into public spaces in which people expressed their opinions and values. So we've ended up in a situation in which we expect the norms of Speaker's Corner to apply in Westfield, though a shopping mall is not a public space.

Which is why we can expect Consent of the Networked to find its way on to reading lists in political science. And it may as well be why the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard has just launched a course on politics and the internet .