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Open Networks, Closed Regimes
kris writes "First Monday has an interesting article on Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule, presenting evidence that The Internet may not be automatic downfall of authoritan regimes as anecdotes commonly suggest.
In their words: The authors trace Internet use in eight authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries: China, Cuba, Singapore, Vietnam, Burma, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. They discover that authoritarian governments, far from fearing the information age, have chosen to direct Internet development in ways that bolster the state. At the same time, many regimes are struggling to cope with the potent challenges posed by new technologies. The authors encourage policy makers in the U.S. and other industrialized democracies to promote specific Internet-based initiatives that foster political liberalization, rather than perpetuating the myth of the Internet as an unstoppable "virus of freedom.""
they forgot the US
Fleur de Sel
I'm sure he likes them there as much as he liked the USSR troops there.
So many of the comments here say that Internet leading to freedom is a myth because it hasn't worked yet. The problem is that there is no way it can work quickly. Does anyone really think that just giving someone the Internet is going to make the population of some country slap themselves on the collective forehead, and say "How dumb were we?" At best, it will take years before even relatively free desemination of information will undermine a totalitarian regime. The flow information must cause ideas to germinate, discussion to start, groups to form, and a movement to start. Just look at the Vietnam war protests. They didn't happen overnight. It took 10 years for them to develop into their full-blown power. Or even the American Revolution, that didn't happen overnight in 1776. There were years, arguably decades, of events leading up to it.
Does anyone have an idea on what the future will look like for the internet?
Ok, I've been making this argument for about 5 years now. It's not incredibly insightful, it's basically just how things historically work.
Imagine the Wild West...
In the beginning you were pretty much free to do whatever you wanted. Wasn't too many people around, nobody really cared. Move your cattle from Texas to Utah across miles of open territory.
Eventually people started moving out west, formed communities.. established businesses and put up fences. Well the newcomers and the oldtimers didn't take kindly to one another. But the newcomers were more populous and had more money, so they started hiring Marshalls and Sheriffs and Judges and so on and started cracking down on what you could and could not do.
Eventually something becomes large enough where people feel it needs to be regulated, monitored and controlled. The Internet is beginning to get more and more notice, the proliferation of child porn, spam, scams, copyright violations and so on.
We're already seeing the FBI, FTC and other US agencies spend more time on this. That's only going to increase over time.
Now how does this play out on a global scale? That I don't know. With the Westernized Capitalist nations we'll likely see treaties signed which deal with cross-jurisdictional issues. Someone in Australia is caught distributing Child Porn by someone in Denmark, the authorities will have recourse to call up Australia and have him nabbed. This type of cooperation is already happening today, and increasingly becoming more important further in light of this war on terrorism.
As to these other nations the ones mentioned in this article... They'll just continue trying to control users, or isolating themselves from the outside world.
It's the language effect I'm curious about. The initial design didn't really allow for compartamentalizing by language choice. I like the options google.com gives now of restricting results to a particular language. Very helpful. Will the world standardize on English, or will the Internet evolve further to isolate? Perhaps it depends on the nations involved.
Political changes are generational things. In the United States, the civil rights act was passed in the mid-60's, and real change in the South is just happening now, as this comment is being read. In this particular case, it had to wait for the diehard bigots in congress and in the electorate to die off. Freedom in the Soviet Union took a similar change of leadership, over a similar length of time.
There are two general cases that need to be considered, those being "rich" countries and "poor" countries. In those countries where sizeable chunks of the population are starving, changes of politics are quite secondary to the average citizen (though perhaps they should not be, in the long run). Adlai Stevenson expressed it well when he said, "A Hungry Man is not a Free Man." These people have no time to be interested in the internet, though even here, the internet will make changes over the long haul.
In countries where hunger is not the primary motivating force, changes will come faster. One can see the ripples even now -- spend some time in Hong Kong and look around. In some of the most repressive theocracies on the planet, voices for change are being raised, and one of the primary ways we know about them is through the internet.
Have patience; revolutions that happen overnight tend to be accompanied by copious quantities of blood. With any luck, things in many of these places may happen as they did in the Soviet Union. One day, we may wake up and notice that tyrants are becoming yet another endangered species.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.