Mal Fletcher considers issues of regulation, repression, activism and anarchy

Internet service providers (ISPs), search engines, payment providers and advertising networks would then be required to block these sites, without recourse to court hearings or other due legal processes.

What's more, the same proposals allowed for private companies to sue ISPs for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes copyright - even though most ISPs don't control the websites they host.

In the UK, similar proposals were considered in the latter years of the Labour government. They would have given wide powers of web censorship to an unelected government minister, Peter Mandelson.

Thankfully, larger, private ISPs in the UK have now provided their own filtering mechanisms. For example, BT uses a service known as Cleanfeed which identifies sites featuring child pornography.[6] At present the UK is rated as being relatively free of government internet filtering, though of course there are ongoing debates about the need for tighter filtering to protect children.

As the internet becomes woven into more and more of our daily experience, people are coming to see access as a basic right.

Between November 2009 and February 2010, the BBC World Service conducted a poll among more than 27,000 adults in 26 countries, including 14,000 internet users. Of the results, the chairman of the polling agency said: "Despite worries about privacy and fraud, people around the world see access to the internet as their fundamental right. They think the web is a force for good, and most don't want governments to regulate it."[7]

So if Mr Assange is concerned about the potential of governments to clamp down on internet freedoms, he is right to be so. He may, however, be indirectly giving them a pretext for doing so.

Activism or Anarchism?

Even within some liberal democratic governments, there remains a lingering suspicion that at the very core of internet culture, among those who shape it most, there are a group of cowboy individualists who lean more toward anarchism than activism.

Therefore, the thinking goes, whilst the internet is a helpful mechanism for entertainment and communication among the masses, it is fundamentally not to be trusted within power structures.

The charge of cyber-anarchism is one that some government leaders level at Julian Assange and his colleagues at WikiLeaks - with some justification.

His supporters argue that he and his colleagues are champions of free speech. Some claim that they are defenders of press freedoms or brave advocates of the true culture of the internet. There are good reasons to be wary of all three arguments.

In any society, true freedom of speech requires that citizens take responsibility for what they say. Acclaiming individual rights without recognising concomitant social responsibilities is the beginning of anarchism.

What's more, when the authority you claim is of the moral variety, you must be seen to be above reproach. This requires that you allow yourself to be measured by some standard beyond yourself.