The New Republic

Vientiane, Laos

Last spring, during a trip to Laos, I visited an Internet caf in the
capital, Vientiane. Inside, the scene reminded me more of the West
Village than the heart of a backward, communist nation. Though
Laotians threshed rice by hand just a few miles away, the caf
itself was thoroughly modern. Tourists and local teenagers surfed
the Internet on relatively new PCs. On a large screen on one wall,
music videos featured Madonna gyrating half-naked. Below, kids
seated at a row of computers logged onto pop-culture sites like
MTV.com.Yet, despite its trendiness and high-tech appearance, the Internet
joint conspicuously lacked one element usually associated with caf
life: any discussion of current events. Virtually no one in the caf
spoke with anyone else. Except for the tourists, no one seemed to
venture onto news Web pages-- this, despite the fact that many
Laotians can read Thai and could have accessed uncensored
information on news sites based in neighboring (and democratic)
Thailand. When I attempted to access the Web pages of exile groups
opposed to the authoritarian Vientiane regime, I received an error
message saying the pages were not accessible.

My experience in the Vientiane caf was a sobering antidote to a
pervasive myth: that the Internet is a powerful force for
democracy. For years, a significant subset of the democratization
industry--that network of political scientists, think tanks, and
policymakers--has placed its bets (and, in many cases, its money)
on the Web's potential to spread liberal ideas in illiberal parts
of the world. Whereas once American politicians and democratization
groups focused on older technologies, such as radio, today their
plans to spread democracy rest in considerable part on programs for
boosting Internet access. In early March, Secretary of State Colin
Powell told Congress that a crucial part of the Bush
administration's democratization initiative will be establishing
"American corners" in libraries overseas, complete with Internet
kiosks where locals can surf the Web. In the Middle East, American
diplomats have touted their recent online interactions with locals,
such as Web dialogue between the American consul in Jeddah and
Saudis.

But world leaders, journalists, and political scientists who tout
the Internet as a powerful force for political change are just as
wrong as the dot- com enthusiasts who not so long ago believed the
Web would completely transform business. While it's true that the
Internet has proved itself able to disseminate pop culture in
authoritarian nations--not only Laos, but China, Singapore, Saudi
Arabia, and elsewhere--to date, its political impact has been
decidedly limited. It has yet to topple--or even seriously
undermine--its first tyrannical regime. In fact, in some repressive
countries the spread of the Internet actually may be helping
dictatorships remain in power.

Ever since the Internet became a mass medium in the mid-'90s, its
advocates have been touting its political potential. In a 1996
appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, John Perry Barlow,
co-founder of one of the leading Internet freedom organizations,
delivered an address titled "Declaration of the Independence of
Cyberspace." In it, he announced, "The global social space we are
building" will "be naturally independent of the tyrannies [that
governments] impose on us." Other leading political theorists, such
as Harvard's Joseph Nye, argued that, by increasing information
flows within and between countries and providing a space for
political organization, the Internet would threaten dictators.

With the gauntlet laid down, the Internet became a new focus of
America's foreign policy elite. Political science departments began
hiring faculty with backgrounds in both political theory and
computer science. The National Democratic Institute and other
democratization groups in Washington made seminars on utilizing the
Web for political discourse a central part of their agenda. In a
1995 study, the Pentagon predicted the Internet would prove a
"strategic threat to authoritarian regimes." In 2000, President
Clinton told reporters that, "in the new century, liberty will
spread by ... cable modem" and memorably warned that, if China's
leaders attempted to crack down on the Web, they would find it as
difficult as "trying to nail Jell-O to the wall." In 1999,
then-presidential candidate George W. Bush confidently predicted
that, if the Internet were to take hold in China, "freedom's genie
will be out of the bottle."

Since taking office, the Bush administration has focused on programs
to expand Web access in the Middle East, such as funding for
Internet connections in Arab schools. Margaret Tutwiler,
undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs,
recently told Congress that such efforts would help provide people
in the Middle East with "a window on the world. ... It opens up a
whole lot of avenues that I think are in our self-interest." Edward
Djerejian, chairman of the White House advisory group on public
diplomacy, testified that, "given the strategic importance of
information technologies, a greater portion of the budget should be
directed to tap the resources of the Internet."

Academics and journalists, too, have bought into the idea,
frequently pointing to increased Internet usage as de facto
evidence of political liberalization. "The Internet and
globalization," wrote The New York Times' Thomas Friedman in 2000,
"are acting like nutcrackers to open societies and empower Arab
democrats." A year later, when Bashar Assad became president of
Syria, the fact that he had once headed a Syrian computer group was
taken as evidence that he might be a liberalizer. Saudi Arabia is
the most recent beneficiary of this kind of misunderstanding, with
media reports crediting the desert kingdom with liberalization
based on its burgeoning Internet culture. This March, The Economist
enthused, "The Internet, the mobile phone and satellite television
are all eroding the [Saudi] authorities' control."

But little of this excitement is predicated on empirical research.
It's true, of course, that Internet usage has surged in many
authoritarian nations. In China, the number of people accessing the
Web on a regular basis has risen from fewer than one million in
1997 to almost 70 million in 2003. In the Middle East, Internet
penetration has nearly doubled in the past five years. It's also
true that this increased access has provided some citizens of
dictatorships more access to the outside world and helped loosen
restrictive cultural norms. By prompting more open discussion of
sexuality, for instance, foreign websites may make it easier for
Southeast Asian youngsters to talk frankly about sex--a life-
and-death proposition in a region decimated by HIV/aids.

Yet the growth of the Internet has not substantially altered the
political climate in most authoritarian countries. In
quasi-authoritarian Singapore, where more than 50 percent of the
population has regular Internet access, the ruling People's Action
Party actually increased its political stranglehold in the last
election, winning more than 95 percent of the seats in the
legislature. In Malaysia, another country where Internet access is
much higher than in most of the developing world, the ruling United
Malays National Organization, which has been in power for over two
decades, dominated this week's national elections. The State
Department's March report on human rights in Burma says, "The
Government's extremely poor human rights record worsened. ...
Citizens still did not have the right to change their government."
And its annual report on human rights in China, also released in
March, said that last year saw "backsliding on key human rights
issues" by Beijing--such significant backsliding that the United
States is considering censuring China at the U.N. Human Rights
Commission. Indeed, nearly all the Chinese political science
professors I have spoken with agree that the mainland Chinese
democracy movement is weaker now than it was a decade ago. Nor is
this unhappy trend limited to the Far East. Since March 2003, the
Cuban government has initiated its biggest crackdown on dissent in
years. Neither Cuba nor such Middle Eastern nations as Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, and Syria have made any recent progress toward
democracy, according to Freedom House's 2004 ranking of countries
around the world.

Why has the Web failed to transform such regimes? In part because,
as a medium, the Web is in many ways ill-suited for expressing and
organizing dissent. And, even more significantly, because, as a
technology, it has proved surprisingly easy for authoritarian
regimes to stifle, control, and co-opt.

Many Internet advocates forget that, on the most basic level, the
Web is a vehicle merely for disseminating information. Someone, in
other words, first needs to have access to the information and a
willingness to share it. In practice, this means the impact of the
Web depends to a certain degree on local resources--specifically,
the existence of opposition networks able to provide evidence of
government wrongdoing. This limitation is evident when one compares
Malaysia with Singapore. "The Internet has had more impact on
politics in Malaysia than in Singapore," says Cherian George, who
is writing a book on Internet usage in Southeast Asia. There are
several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Malaysia committed
to investigating the government; in Singapore, there are virtually
none. As a consequence, when activists in Malaysia want to use the
Web to highlight human rights abuses, George says, they can draw
upon the information amassed by the NGOs from their networks of
sources. Singaporeans, by contrast, have no such resources. This is
part of the reason James Gomez, founder of the well-known
Singaporean dissident website ThinkCentre.org, admits that his
organization has not significantly altered local politics by using
the Internet.

Another shortcoming of the Internet is that it lends itself to
individual rather than communal activities. It "is about people
sitting in front of a terminal, barely interacting," says one
Laotian researcher. The Web is less well-suited to fostering
political discussion and debate because, unlike radio or even
television, it does not generally bring people together in one house
or one room. In Rangoon, the capital of Burma--one of the most
repressive nations on earth--groups of men often crowd around
radios in tea shops to clandestinely listen to news from the BBC's
Burmese service and then discuss what they've heard. Similarly, in
bars and cafs in China, people gather around televisions to watch
and discuss the news. But, while restaurateurs in the developing
world can afford to use a radio or television to lure customers who
might have a snack while listening or watching, owners of Internet
cafs have to recoup their much higher capital investments. They do
this by dividing their establishments into individual terminals and
charging each user separately. In fact, in nearly every Internet
caf I have visited, in Vientiane last year and in Rangoon this
winter (as well as in New York and in London), I have watched the
same scenes of people sitting in front of individual computer
terminals, barely talking to each other.

Add to this a still more simple fact about the Internet--that,
unlike television or radio, it generally requires users to be
literate--and it's not hard to see why democracy advocates in
authoritarian countries (and some authoritarian leaders) consider
older, broadcast media to be a more effective means of
disseminating information and fostering debate. Wang Dan, a
well-known Chinese democracy activist, has argued that television
and radio are still the best means for communicating dissident
messages within China. Western diplomats in Laos concur, telling me
that Thai television, available to many Laotians, has more
potential than the Internet to subvert the authoritarian Laotian
government. Likewise, in the Middle East, Islamist
organizations--the only groups that have had much success
challenging authoritarian regimes in the region--have largely
disdained the Web, relying instead on clandestine videos and
audiocassettes, which can be watched communally and then passed
along from mosque to mosque.

In addition to lending itself primarily to individual use, the
Internet also fosters a kind of anarchy inimical to an effective
opposition movement. Singaporean dissident Gomez says the Web
empowers individual members of a political movement, rather than
the movement as a whole. Opposition members can offer dissenting
opinions at will, thus undermining the leadership and potentially
splintering the organization. In combating an authoritarian regime,
in other words, there's such a thing as too much democracy. Two of
the most successful opposition movements of the last few
decades--the South African opposition led by Nelson Mandela and the
Burmese resistance led by Aung San Suu Kyi--relied upon
charismatic, almost authoritarian leaders to set a message followed
by the rest of the movement. The anti-globalization movement, by
contrast, has been a prime example of the anarchy that can develop
when groups utilize the Web to organize. Allowing nearly anyone to
make a statement or call a meeting via the Web, the
anti-globalizers have wound up with large but unorganized rallies
in which everyone from serious critics of free trade to advocates
of witches and self-anointed saviors of famed death-row convict
Mumia Abu Jumal have their say. To take just one example, at the
anti-globalization World Social Forum held in Mumbai in January,
nuanced critics of globalization like former World Bank chief
economist Joseph Stiglitz shared space with, as The New York Times
reported, "a long list of regional causes," including anti-
Microsoft and anti-Coca Cola activists.; But the Internet's inherent
flaws as a political medium are only part of the reason for its
failure to spread liberty.. ..

But the Internet's inherent flaws as a political medium are only
part of the reason for its failure to spread liberty. More
significant has been the ease with which authoritarian regimes have
controlled and, in some cases, subverted it. The most
straightforward way governments have responded to opposition
websites has been simply to shut them down. In Singapore, for
example, an online political forum called Sintercom became popular
in the mid-'90s as one of the only places where citizens could
express political opinions relatively openly. But, following
government pressure, Sintercom was shut down in 2001. Since then,
according to Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas, authors of the
recent comprehensive book Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact
of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule, the scope of online
political discussion in Singapore has shrunk. In Malaysia, too,
many of the anti-government websites that formed in the mid-'90s
have been shuttered, enabling the regime to beat back a liberal
reform movement that sprang up five years ago.

But nowhere has a regime's ability to corral the Internet been more
apparent than in China, the world's largest authoritarian state.
Despite President Clinton's prediction, Beijing has proved that it
can, in fact, nail Jell-O to the wall. A 2003 study by Jonathan
Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, two Harvard researchers, found that
China has created the most extensive system of Internet censorship
in the world and has almost completely controlled the impact of the
Web on dissent. It has done this, they note, by mandating that all
Web traffic go through government-controlled servers and by
constructing an elaborate system of firewalls--which prevent access
to certain websites--and online monitoring by state security
agents. Censored sites include much of the Western media and sites
related to Taiwan, democratization, and other sensitive topics.
(The New York Times won a reprieve only when its former editor
appealed personally to former President Jiang Zemin.) In their
book, Kalathil and Boas note that Saudi Arabia has constructed
similarly comprehensive systems to limit online dissent, expanding
their "censorship mechanism to keep pace with the burgeoning
sources of objectionable content." What's more, various
authoritarian regimes have collaborated with one another to improve
their ability to control the Web. As Kalathil and Boas note, China
is formally advising Cuba on its Internet policies, while several
Middle Eastern states have looked to Singapore as an example in
controlling their citizens' Web usage.

In such efforts, authoritarian regimes have also benefited from the
willingness of Western companies to sell the latest censorship
technology. Cybersecurity companies, such as San Jose-based Secure
Computing, have competed intensely to sell Web-filtering and
-monitoring technology to Riyadh, Beijing, and other repressive
governments. One vice president of Websense, a San Diego company
that competed for the Saudi contract, told the Times in 2001 that
it would "be a terrific deal to win." Unsurprisingly, these
companies have not made a similar effort to provide cash-poor
dissidents in these nations with technology that could enable them
to overcome firewalls or conceal their online identities. In a 2002
study, Michael Chase and James Mulvenon, two rand researchers,
found that the Chinese authorities were able to prevent Internet
users from accessing anti-monitoring technology 80 percent of the
time.

China also has co-opted its own local Internet content providers. In
2002, the country's leading Web entrepreneurs signed a pledge
vowing to promote self- discipline in Web usage and encourage "the
elimination of deleterious information [on] the Internet." Some of
these Internet entrepreneurs are former dissidents who fled China
after the 1989 Tiananmen uprising but have since abandoned their
political activism, returning to China seeking Web fortune. In
fact, as Kalathil and Boas note, "Many of China's up-and-coming
Internet entrepreneurs see a substantial ... role for the
government in the Internet sector. ... [They] have visions for
Chinese Internet development that are inherently pragmatic and
complementary to state strategy." So much for Barlow's idea that
technology workers will reject the "tyrannies" of government.

In the past two years, as authoritarian regimes have become more
sophisticated in controlling the Web, many of them have been able to
leverage that control to create climates of online self-censorship.
According to Nina Hachigian, an expert on China at the Pacific
Council on International Policy, the knowledge that the Chinese
government monitors online activity, combined with Internet laws so
broad they could apply to almost any Web surfer, effectively scare
most users into avoiding political sites altogether. As Gary Rodan,
a Southeast Asia specialist at Murdoch University in Australia,
notes in an essay on Singapore in Political Science Quarterly,
"When extensive networks of political surveillance are already in
place and a culture of fear about such practices exists, the impact
of monitoring is likely to be strong."

To maintain this fear, Internet cops in China launch periodic
crackdowns on the Web, arresting and prosecuting Chinese citizens
for posting Web items related to democracy or to helping people
evade firewalls. Beijing also has shuttered thousands of Internet
cafs over the past four years. On a visit to Shanghai in 1999, I
noticed numerous new cafs. By 2003, many had been closed. Other
authoritarian regimes have used similar bullying tactics to foster
climates of self-censorship online. Singapore also has drafted broad
Internet laws that could implicate many Web users and, Kalathil and
Boas report, has reinforced citizens' paranoia by occasionally
arresting people for posting articles critical of the government
and by periodically reminding the public that the country's one
Internet service provider, which is connected the government,
snoops through users' Web accounts. The Vietnamese government has
made owners of Internet cafs responsible for anything users post
online and has made a series of arrests over the past two years of
people who posted dissident articles. In January, Hanoi sentenced a
man who used the Web to criticize the Vietnamese government to
seven years in prison.

Even beyond its failure to live up to democratizers' dreams, the Web
may actually be helping to keep some dictatorships in power. Asian
dissidents have told me that the Web has made it easier for
authoritarian regimes to monitor citizens. In Singapore, Gomez
says, the government previously had to employ many security agents
and spend a lot of time to monitor activists who were meeting with
each other in person. But, with the advent of the Web, security
agents can easily use government-linked servers to track the
activities of activists and dissidents. In fact, Gomez says, in
recent years opposition groups in Singapore have moved away from
communicating online and returned to exchanging information
face-to-face, in order to avoid surveillance.

In China, the Web has similarly empowered the authorities. In the
past two decades, Beijing's system of monitoring the population by
installing informers into businesses, neighborhoods, and other
social institutions has broken down-- in part because the Chinese
population has become more transient and in part because the
regime's embrace of capitalism has meant fewer devoted Communists
willing to spy for the government. But Beijing has replaced these
legions of informers with a smaller group of dedicated security
agents who monitor the Internet traffic of millions of Chinese.
"The real problem with groups trying to use the Internet is that
you are actually more easily monitored if you use online forms of
communication than if you just meet in person in secret," one
specialist in Chinese Internet usage told me. Indeed, in May 2003
Beijing's security services imprisoned four people for "inciting
the overthrow of the Chinese government"; press reports suggested
the authorities learned about the dissidents' movements through
reports on pro-democracy websites. Later, in February of this year,
Beijing charged Du Daobin, a well-known Internet dissident, with
"inciting subversion of state power and the overthrow of China's
socialist system."

In the Middle East, security services have used the Internet in
similar ways. In Egypt, police once had to conduct time-consuming
stakeouts of bars and clubs to find gay men breaking the laws
against homosexuality. Yet, in 2002, the Associated Press reported
that a group of state security agents went "online masquerading as
gay men ... [and] arrested men ... who responded to the ads." In
its most recent annual report on human rights in Egypt, the State
Department noted, "Egyptian police have continued to target
homosexuals using Internet-based sting operations."

What's more, authoritarian regimes have begun flooding the Web with
their own content, using high-profile websites to actually increase
support for the government. Kalathil and Boas report that
e-government services "are likely to boost regime legitimacy,
particularly in countries [like Singapore and China] where the
state has traditionally offered extensive services [such as social
welfare programs] in exchange for political support." Singapore has
indeed developed one of the most extensive e-government sites in
the world, and Hachigian's research shows that nearly one-tenth of
all sites in China are directly related to the Beijing regime. Some
of these sites, such as the e- government sites for Beijing
municipality, are very sophisticated and include sections in which
citizens can e-mail Beijing's mayor with suggestions. (There is
little evidence, however, that the mayor feels any need to respond
to or even read the submissions.)

Dictators also have poured money into the websites of state-linked
media outlets, helping to make them more appealing than their
independent competitors. Gomez says that The Straits Times, the
government-linked newspaper in Singapore with the most
sophisticated and comprehensive website, is where nearly everyone
in Singapore goes for news. Similarly, the People's Daily, a
leading party publication in China, now has a very sophisticated
Internet presence and has become a leading source of news for wired
Chinese. Its chat rooms have become notorious for their
nationalistic sentiment--partly the consequence of security bureau
Beijing agents logging into the rooms and posting xenophobic
statements. Indeed, during crises like the China-U.S. spy- plane
incident in 2001 and the run-up to last week's election in Taiwan,
Beijing has utilized these chat rooms to whip up patriotic
sentiment.

In the long run, the Internet may fulfill some of its hype as an
engine of liberalization. Gomez told me that small civil society
groups that do not attract as much attention from state security
agents--professional organizations, charities, religious
groups--are where the Internet's true potential is likely to be.
Not, in other words, with groups pushing for regime change. Chinese
environmental organizations provide an example of how smaller
groups can benefit: These single-issue groups, which normally focus
on one environmental problem, have used the Web to coordinate
meetings. What's more, by empowering small companies, the Web may
decrease state control of the economy. In New Media, New Politics?
From Satellite Television to the Internet in the Arab World, a
recent study of technology in the Middle East, Jon Alterman reports
that, in countries like the Persian Gulf states, the spread of the
Web may allow small, nimble entrepreneurs to challenge the massive,
state- linked companies that have been the foundations of
autocratic regimes.

While recognizing that the Internet is not developing into the
political tool many had predicted, governments and private
companies could help promote the Web's gradual emergence as a force
for change. In the House of Representatives, Christopher Cox has
sponsored legislation to allow U.S. companies to more easily export
encryption technology, which lets Internet users send coded
messages that cannot be monitored by central governments. Other
legislators have proposed a U.S. Office of Global Internet Freedom
designed to facilitate the reform of Internet policies around the
world. Most important, the private sector could push regimes not to
crack down on Internet freedoms. Such an idea is not wishful
thinking. China, Malaysia, Singapore, and other authoritarian
states desperately want to prove that they are modern, First World
nations, and mastering the Internet is essential to this image.
Malaysia has built a massive "Multimedia Super Corridor" in an
attempt to create a local version of Silicon Valley, while
Singapore has promoted itself as an "Intelligent Island" hardwired
into the Web. Consequently, foreign companies can have some
influence over dictators, since, without their assistance,
authoritarian regimes cannot realize their pretensions of
modernity. According to The New York Times, John Kamm, the former
head of Hong Kong's American Chamber of Commerce, once gave a
speech at a banquet for Zhou Nan, Beijing's senior representative
in the city, in which he asked Zhou to push for the release of a
prominent student detained during the Tiananmen Square protest.
Though in public Zhou reacted icily to Kamm's request, a month later
the student was released.

But neither Western governments nor Western companies seem likely to
step up to the plate. Since the war on terrorism began, the Bush
administration has been at pains not to ruffle Beijing's feathers.
(Indeed, in an ironic twist, the White House is now considering
Web-surveillance techniques similar to those utilized by the
Chinese government.) Meanwhile, as the information-technology
sector continues to struggle, most tech companies are unwilling to
risk alienating potential clients, such as the Chinese government.
In part, this eagerness to jump into bed with Beijing and Riyadh
reflects the economic reality of a sector no longer in a state of
permanent expansion. And, in part, it represents the transition of
the Web from a technology run by civil- libertarian geeks like
Barlow to one dominated by relatively conservative, large
corporations. "In the mid-1990s, there was this feeling among the
Web's early users that it had to be a medium to promote freedom,"
says author George. "But companies like AOL, they don't share that
commitment--they focus on entertainment." Indeed, Yahoo! and
America Online have both willingly censored their news content to
please authoritarian regimes like China. "I haven't seen any
businesses pushing governments in this way," Gomez told me. "People
are giving up on the idea of the Internet as a frontier for
freedom."

By Joshua Kurlantzick

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