Censorship Wins Out

A decade or so ago, it was all clear: the Internet was believed to be such a revolutionary new medium, so inherently empowering and democratizing, that old authoritarian regimes would crumble before it. What we've learned in the intervening years is that the Internet does not inevitably lead to democracy any more than it inevitably leads to great wealth.

The idea that the Internet itself is a threat to authoritarian regimes was a bit of delusional post-Cold War optimism. It is true that many activists and journalists have brought their struggle for democracy, the rule of law and freedom of expression to the new medium, but they have not been blessed by inevitable victory, and plenty of nasty regimes have learned how to co-exist with the Internet in one way or another. In country after country, the same old struggle goes on: hard-line regimes and their opponents remain locked in battle, and the Internet has become simply one more forum for their fight.

Paranoid Regimes

Repressive regimes are paranoid by nature. Those in power see enemies everywhere and encourage mass paranoia, overemphasizing threats to national security in order to justify their draconian rule. When early Web-heads equated the Internet with inevitable democracy, paranoia-prone regimes were natural suckers for the idea.

"The Web really does scare these regimes," Veronica Forwood told me. Forwood is the UK Representative for Reporters without Borders, the publisher of the excellent "Enemies of the Internet" report, outlining the situation in many regimes around the world, "They want to control everything, and the Web seems so nebulous and unknowable to them, they are just frightened by it."

Indeed, many repressive states see the Internet as such a threat that they simply ban it altogether. The former regime in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and North Korea are two cases of a complete ban, though it is known that a few very high-ranking ministers in each regime have had access to e-mail at least.

Another particularly harsh example is Burma. A. Lin Neumann, Asia Consultant for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and author of an excellent recent report on press freedom in Burma, explained to me that the military junta in Rangoon effectively prevents public Internet access in the country. One needs a permit for a modem, and though a few people have them illegally, long-distance calls for foreign access are prohibitively expensive. The tiny number of government-approved e-mail accounts are all monitored by censors, and the high price of those accounts again keeps most ordinary citizens away in any case.

Relying on high access costs as a de facto censor is an easy trick for regimes, as they generally lord over desperately poor countries. As we previously discussed here in OJR, Uzbekistan is a perfect example. In true Soviet style, the authorities in Tashkent have set up the technical infrastructure so that they have the capability to monitor e-mails and Web browsing, but it seems they don't actually interfere that much just yet, because they know the price of access means that only a tiny fraction of the population are online, an insignificant fraction apparently in the authorities' view.

But an all-out ban and relying on high access costs are hardly the only methods of keeping control over online information. Despite the theory behind the Internet's built-in anti-censorship architecture, official control is actually very possible in practice, especially as the regimes run the telecommunications infrastructure when the country comes online.

In Iraq the regime is trying to use the Internet to its own advantage while cutting off access to the public. The Internet is accessible from some government ministries, but since, like Burma, one needs special permission to own a modem, home access is limited to the most trusted members of the ruling elite.