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The U.S. can help ensure free Web access in countries like Iran.
By L. Gordon Crovitz
Source: The Wall Street Journal
March 15, 2010
The information battle was so much simpler in the Cold War. U.S. government broadcasting services Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty brought news to people behind the Iron Curtain, playing a key role in undermining communism. Everyone in the West understood the value of this broadcasting, even with the costs of getting around jamming by repressive governments.
We’re all just beginning to understand the importance of the modern-day version of Radio Liberty—the Web and services available online. It’s time to get serious about protecting the freedom of servers.
Radio Free Europe broadcasts pierced the Iron Curtain. Newer technology can break barriers today. Associated Press
Radio Free Europe broadcasts pierced the Iron Curtain. Newer technology can break barriers today.
Technology helps dissidents around the world share information, communicate and organize through services such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. These companies have done more thinking about the implications of their technologies than have the government agencies charged with defending the Internet.
As of last week, at least the Treasury Department now makes clear it does not prohibit companies from helping dissidents. It lifted rules that had blocked them from providing services to individuals in Iran, Sudan and Cuba for Web browsing, blogs, email, instant messaging, social networking and sharing photos and videos—in other words, the tools that the political opposition, activists and journalists need in these countries.
The export restrictions had originally aimed at weakening authoritarian governments by prohibiting export of technology to selected countries. Companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Google declined to provide many of their services, even those that were for use by individuals in Iran, Sudan and Cuba.
Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said last week that it changed the rules to “ensure that individuals in these countries can exercise their universal right to free speech and information to the greatest extent possible.” It’s an overdue but important recognition of the difference between arming repressive governments and arming courageous citizens with the tools of modern communications to get information out about the repression.
Still, we’re a long way from having a clear policy in support of the liberating power of digital technologies. The potential is unmistakable. The opposition in Iran last summer organized itself through social media and agitated via cellphone cameras following the stolen election. A small group in Colombia got one million people to demonstrate against the FARC guerrilla group. Chinese dissidents “fan qiang”—jump the Great Firewall—to comment on everything from the country’s melamine-poisoned milk supply to illegal property expropriation.
But modern technology also gives authoritarian regimes new power to monitor and punish critics. Tehran slows Web access in advance of planned protests. China has closed off Internet access to the restive Xinjiang region since an uprising in July. Regimes use the transparency of social media to hunt down troublemakers and their allies. Even if U.S. technology companies can now offer services on the Web, ordinary people can’t use them if their countries shut off access.
Which raises this question: Why shouldn’t the U.S. go further and ensure access to the Web by people in especially deserving countries such as Iran? In explaining the change in technology export policy last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hinted at this more ambitious approach when she said that the U.S. would “support those Iranians who wish to circumvent” Internet censorship by Tehran. Full circumvention—in other words, giving Iranians access to the Web regardless of Tehran’s policies—would be a significant undertaking.
Ethan Zuckerman, a Harvard researcher and founder of the international blog aggregator Global Voices, wrote a post earlier this month that laid out the difficulties. He gave the example of what it would take to provide proxy Internet access for China, giving the country’s 385 million Internet users access to the open Web. Bandwidth costs alone could be more than $160 million a year, he estimated, before the costs of servers, routers and system administrators.
These costs could be reduced if ensured access was only to certain sites and services, perhaps news and information sites plus social media. Ensuring free Web access in a smaller country such as Iran would be less costly. Still, Mr. Zuckerman is dubious that the State Department “can or wants to build or fund a free ISP.” But another way of looking at the opportunity is that this level of investment is on par with the costs of radio transmissions during the Cold War.
The Cold War was won by spreading information about the Free World. Information was backed up by hard power. In a world of tyrants scared of their own citizens, the new tools of the Web should be even more terrifying if the outside world makes sure that people have access to its tools.