The Economist: Caught in the net

Instead of undermining repressive regimes, the internet might strengthen them

If the internet will force difficult changes on democracies by handing power to individual citizens, it seems reasonable to believe that it will have a devastating impact on dictatorships. But it is not impossible that instead of undermining repressive regimes, the internet could become the most effective tool of social control that autocratic rulers have ever wielded.

New communication technologies have long been thought of as unequivocally on the side of political freedom. Authoritarian regimes invariably go to great lengths to control the flow of information, and are especially obsessed with communications between individuals. Surely, then, increasing flows of information will undermine the power of such regimes? Optimism about techno-liberation soared when western television and radio broadcasts were seen to play a role in bringing down the Berlin wall. "Technology will make it increasingly difficult for the state to control the information its people receive," said Ronald Reagan soon after stepping down as America's president: "The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip." Speaking ten years later, Bill Clinton argued that China's efforts to crack down on the internet were "like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall." Most people agreed.

But so far the internet has not proved as subversive to authoritarian regimes as expected. A report published this month by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule", by Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor Boas, looks at the internet in a range of countries from China to Saudi Arabia and concludes that the conventional wisdom is wrong: "The internet is not necessarily an insurmountable threat to authoritarian regimes." The political impact of the internet varies from country to country, say the authors, and depends more on social or economic circumstances and the government's own policies than on the catalytic effects of the internet itself. In societies where the government holds all political power and is willing to crack down hard on any dissent, a mere connection to the outside world has not been enough to force change. "Rather than sounding the death knell for authoritarianism, the global diffusion of the internet presents both opportunity and challenge for authoritarian regimes," they write.

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But for other authoritarian countries the dilemma of the internet has been more acute. They are desperate to exploit its enormous economic potential. The biggest obstacle to development in poor countries is isolation from the world economy, and even the very poor sometimes benefit from an internet connection. Fishermen gain access to weather forecasts, farmers to the latest prices paid for produce in distant urban markets. Connecting a poor country could help its economy take off, a potent lure for any government. At the same time repressive regimes are determined to limit the internet's threat to their political control. Can they do both?

The most interesting example is China, which with 46m users already has the world's third-largest number of internet connections after the United States and Japan. Rapid growth in usage has been actively encouraged by the Chinese government, which sees electronic commerce as a main plank for modernising the economy and maintaining growth. At the same time it uses a panoply of techniques to curb the internet's political effects. Last September it attracted worldwide attention by blocking some access to Google and Altavista, two popular search engines, though after protests inside and outside China it partially restored the service. In addition to blocking sites, the Chinese government has deployed a range of other technical tools, from sophisticated monitoring of e-mail traffic and chatrooms to hacking attacks and viruses aimed at hostile websites. But even more effective has been its encouragement of self-censorship among internet service providers, content companies and users.

Although China has welcomed private investment into its telecoms infrastructure, it has carefully retained control over operating licences and over the system's backbone. This allows the authorities not only to use sophisticated monitoring techniques, but to punish any firms that step out of line. Most, including many big western firms, have been eager to comply. Likewise, by occasionally cracking down harshly on individuals, the authorities have intimidated most Chinese into staying within accepted boundaries on the internet. Chinese users never know who might be watching the way they use it, or when the axe might fall.

So far, this approach has been highly successful. The Falun Gong, […], won a large following in the late 1990s by using e-mail and websites, but today the group's [practitioners] inside the country communicate mostly by payphone, which is harder to trace than e-mail.

The Chinese government's approach to the internet is a microcosm of its effort to liberalise the economy without relinquishing the Communist Party's monopoly of political power. Its attempt to control the internet's development will both mirror and feed back into political events. Future technological developments may play an important part, but are not likely to be the determining factor.

China's employment of advanced technologies to filter and monitor web usage has outraged many computer programmers in the West. These so-called "hacktivists" are combining hacker skills with political activism to fight what they see as a perversion of the internet's promise. The Chinese authorities are probably already working on counter-measures. This cat-and-mouse contest is likely to go on for years. With millions of programmers of its own, China is bound to get some home-grown hacktivism as well.

But the contest looks decidedly lopsided. On one side are small bands of political dissidents, human-rights activists and hackers; on the other stand not only authoritarian regimes but also western governments, who want to stay one step ahead of the hackers and are reluctant to support hacktivism even against dictatorships. They are supported by most of the commercial world, which wants to monitor and record web usage to make money, enforce copyrights, acquire customers, deliver new services and protect its own operations from malicious hacker attacks. American and European companies have fallen over each other in their eagerness to sell the latest surveillance gear and software to China and Saudi Arabia.

Worryingly, the same technological trends that are so rapidly eroding privacy in the West could put powerful tools in the hands of repressive regimes. As more human interactions are conducted and recorded electronically, as the ability to analyse databases grows and as video and other offline surveillance technologies become cheaper and more effective, it will become ever easier for authoritarian governments to set up systems of widespread surveillance. George Orwell's Big Brother of "1984" might yet become a reality, a few decades later than he expected.