Recent events – notably the furore over the release of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks and the role of social networking in fuelling the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya – have refocused attention on the question: Is the Internet really an agent for revolutionary change? Or is it just a technology that will eventually be ‘captured’ and controlled by established power structures?
Answers are invariably refracted through ideological prisms. Optimists, who see the Internet as the first truly ‘uncensorable’ communications channel in history, draw comfort from the ways in which it ensures that news gets out from even the most tightly controlled domains. Those who are sceptical about its revolutionary potential see corroboration of their views in the apparent ease with which governments in Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Burma, Iran and China have been able to shut down the network in their jurisdictions, and in the speed with which WikiLeaks’s network access and financial services were terminated by US Internet companies like Amazon and PayPal, in the wake of the ‘Cablegate’ revelations. Surely a network so apparently vulnerable to such arbitrary actions cannot really be revolutionary?
The truth is that the relationship between the Internet and the established order has been more nuanced than either of these views might suggest. And the relationship has also changed over time. The Harvard scholar John Palfrey identifies four distinct phases in its evolution. Between 1983 and 1999, he argues, the Internet was indeed free of government interference, largely because it was exclusively an academic preserve and politicians were largely uninterested in it. Palfrey categorises the years 2000-2005 as the ‘access denied’ phase, when some governments tried to bar their citizens from using the Net, and 2006-2010 as a phase in which governments tried various ways of controlling or regulating Internet use. Palfrey believes that we have now entered a new phase, which he categorises as ‘access contested’.
The Internet that we use today emerged in a decade-long design process that began Trying to censor the uncensorable after the successful completion, in 1972, of the Pentagon-funded Arpanet project. It was in the first phase of the network’s working life (1983-1999) that libertarian and utopian views of its significance were forged, and it’s easy to see why. The community of academics and researchers that coalesced around the network was comprised of people who knew and trusted one another, shared a common culture (some would call it a counter-culture) and gloried in the fact that technological ingenuity had provided them with a communication system that was as sophisticated and cryptographically secure as anything hitherto enjoyed by military and security establishments. It also opened up – via news (i.e. discussion) groups – a debating space that was freer than anything available in the conventional media.
This was intoxicating and liberating in equal measure for the so-called ‘netizens’, but it was deeply shocking to mainstream political America when it first encountered it via the World Wide Web. The establishment’s first attempt to tame the unruly network was farcical: the US Congress passed the Communications Decency Bill in 1996, only to have it ruled unconstitutional within months of becoming law. This prompted John Perry Barlow, a lyricist with the rock band Grateful Dead, to issue a ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’. “Governments of the Industrial World”, it began, “you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Stirring stuff.
But what Barlow and his fellow technolibertarians overlooked was that while governments might be willing to tolerate the activities of a small, insouciant technological elite, they would not take such a tolerant attitude towards the technology if it became an integral part of the everyday life of their citizens. And that is of course what happened as the Web brought the Internet into millions of homes.
Libertarians also overlooked the fact that the organisations that provided citizens with Internet access were no longer just universities committed to freedom of thought and inquiry, but commercial companies interested only in profit and committed to obeying the laws of the countries in which they operate, no matter how repressive. Far from being impossible to control or regulate, it turned out that in some respects the Net was all too amenable to control – as the legal scholars Jack Goldsmith and Timothy Wu elaborated in their study, Who Controls the Internet? (Oxford, 2008).
The WikiLeaks phenomenon illustrates the two sides of the Internet phenomenon. On the one hand, the project has shown that a technologically adroit operation can defeat the efforts of even the most powerful government to keep its secrets. On the other hand, it demonstrates the technological and legal lengths to which that government will go in order to bring the miscreant to heel.
But the vehemence of the US reaction to ‘Cablegate’, and the deployment of the Internet ‘kill switch’ by the Egyptian and Libyan regimes may prove to be counterproductive in the longer term. They have triggered a new wave of technological rebellion in which concerned ‘geeks’ have begun to use their expertise to frustrate the efforts of the established order to control the Net. The best example of this came when the Mubarak regime shut down Twitter and some engineers at Google and Twitter created, in a single weekend, a system that enabled Egyptians to broadcast Twitter messages by leaving voicemails at a number of overseas telephone numbers. The lesson for Mubarak & Co is one as old as Aesop’s fables: if you poke a hornet’s nest, you are likely to get stung.
