Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule

Chapter 1

1 CHAPTER ONE The Conventional Wisdom: What Lies Beneath? Technology will make it increasingly difficult for the state to control the information its people receive. . . . The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip. —Ronald Reagan, speech at London’s Guildhall, June 14, 1989 The world has changed a great deal since Ronald Reagan spoke these words in 1989. To many, subsequent events have borne witness to the truth of his prediction: authoritarian regimes have fallen around the world, while the power of the microchip has risen. The connection between these two phenomena has taken on a powerful, implicit veracity, even when it has not been explicitly detailed. A link between technological advance and democratization remains a powerful assumption in popular thinking, even amid a decline in the general “information age” optimism that characterized much of the 1990s. Specifically, there is now a widespread belief in the policy world that the Internet poses an insurmountable threat to authoritarian rule. Political leaders often espouse this notion: President George W. Bush has asserted that the Internet will bring freedom to China, while Secretary of State Colin Powell has stated that “the rise of democracy and the power of the information revolution combine to leverage each other.”1 President Bill Clinton was also a prolific proponent of the idea that the Internet is inherently a force for democracy.2 Business leaders and media commentators generally concur: former Citicorp chair Walter Wriston has argued in Foreign Affairs that “the virus of freedom . . . is spread by electronic networks to the four corners of the earth,” and journalist Robert Wright claims that “in all probability, resistance to the Internet’s political logic will plainly be futile within a decade or two.”3 2 OPEN NETWORKS, CLOSED REGIMES This conventional wisdom on the Internet and democracy has deeper roots than the ebullient pronouncements of recent politicians and pundits. In part, it draws upon the strong libertarian culture that prevailed among the Internet’s early users—a sentiment epitomized by cyberguru John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”4 In this statement , delivered at the World Economic Forum in 1996, he declared “the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies [governments] seek to impose on us.”5 A faith in technology’s potential to challenge authoritarian rule also emerged out of a particular reading of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, where the Soviet Union’s inability to control the flow of electronic information was seen as crucial to its demise. Ronald Reagan’s 1989 statement was typical of early sentiments about the democratizing potential of computer-based communications . As the diffusion of the Internet increasingly facilitates the globalization of communication, culture, and capital, there is a clear desire among the proponents of the process that all good things (including democracy ) should go together. As is often the case with conventional wisdom, this view has several problems. First, it often imputes a political character to the Internet itself, rather than focusing on specific uses of the technology. The Internet, however , is only a set of connections between computers (or a set of protocols allowing computers to exchange information); it can have no impact apart from its use by human beings. The conventional wisdom also tends to be based on a series of “black-box” assertions that obscure the ways in which the use of technology might truly produce a political outcome. Proponents see the Internet as leading to the downfall of authoritarian regimes, but the mechanisms through which this might occur are rarely specified. Instead , popular assumptions often rest on anecdotal evidence, drawing primarily on isolated examples of Internet-facilitated political protest. Subsequent assertions about the technology’s political effects are usually made without consideration of the full national context in which the Internet operates in any given country. Hence, they fail to weigh politically challenging uses of the Internet against others that might reinforce authoritarian rule. Last, the conventional wisdom assumes a relatively static Internet whose early control-frustrating characteristics are replicated as it diffuses around the world. In this study we seek to critically examine the impact of the Internet in authoritarian regimes, adopting an approach that avoids the pitfalls of the conventional wisdom. First and foremost, we aim to break down and ana- THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM 3 lyze Internet use, taking a comprehensive look at how the Internet...