This year’s Arab Spring revitalized claims that information technologies can serve as a catalyst for fueling revolutions and liberate oppressed citizens. Amid the most recent Syrian and Libyan eruptions, though, opinions on the role of the U.S. government and Western companies are largely divided.

While some argue that the U.S. has created programs to help activists circumvent censorship technologies and amplify their voices; others argue that Western companies are the creators of censorship technologies and the Internet should be taken back from the corporations.

Last Wednesday, Future Tense sponsored an event in Washington exploring the promise and limitations of new technologies in spreading democracy.

Two panelists on different sides of the spectrum weighed in the West’s role in these initiatives.

Michel Posner, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, discussed the U.S. government’s approaches to conflicts in the Middle East, citing $70 million in grants being spent toward these endeavors.

He noted approximately 12 circumvention programs currently being funded by the U.S. State Department including a cell phone panic button, Internet suitcases, a “slingshot” for censored content, and training to help activists operating in repressive areas.

Posner described the Internet as crucial to assisting these past revolutions, and for those in the future.

In the next 20 years five billion people worldwide who will come online, he projected—will an open Internet allow them to take part in the global conversation? Or will they have web-filtered content similar to the search engine Baidu in China, or have to go on a censored, religious network like Iran’s Halal?

Poser argues that the U.S. government’s role in Internet freedom is standing for universal human rights to help empower civil society, “It is up to the people of each country to build societies in which governments respect not some rights part of the time, but all of the rights of the governed, every day. The role of the international community is to offer support — technological and institutional.”

This “international community” also involves large technology companies like Microsoft and Google, in order to maintain an open Internet, he stated—pressing corporations to join the Global Network Initiative.

Some, though, believe that corporations need to change their course of involvement entirely.

Rebecca MacKinnon Senior Schwartz Fellow at New America Foundation and co-founder of Global Voices, found current inclusion for a free Internet difficult, noting that Western technologies companies sell censorship software to the oppressive regimes.

Governments rarely act directly to restrict the Internet and instead, she maintains, policies are mediated through privately owned and operated services, as in the case with Baidu and Halal.

Post-revolution activists in Egypt uncovered a contract for surveillance software made by a Western company being used all over the Middle East and similar software still is, MacKinnon asserts.

With the, “West Censoring the East”, she remarks, how can the Internet evolve in a way to serve the citizen instead of serving other powerful entities? How can people in power use it without abusing it?

The only way the Internet can only be kept free is if Western “netizens” engage online, and insist on structural and policy changes that would expand throughout the globe.

These changes, MacKinnon observes, must start in the West because other governments will then duplicate its structure,

“Internet freedom starts at home not only on a political and government scale, but also in our companies,” she concludes.