Censorship: Not Just for Despots Anymore
In the earlier days of the Internet, just after the “dot-com” Bubble had burst, the world became aware that the Internet, or at least the experience of it, wasn’t the same for every country as it was for the United States. At first, the Internet was presented as a series of interconnected websites and pages. Western countries, having more freedoms under capitalism, enjoyed relatively unfettered access to all the Internet had to offer for a monthly fee. Historically oppressive regimes, however, found it within their best interests to block access to opposition websites and take down web pages that presented any sort of criticism. As services beyond webpages began to spring up; such as chat, picture, and video sharing applications, those same regimes began to crack down on these new avenues of sewing dissent against their despotic ideations.
Back in 2014, USA Today published a listicle (list article) of the Top 10 Internet-censored countries, most of whom are to be expected due to their notable lack of democracy; North Korea, Burma, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Syria, Tunisia, Vietnam, and Turkmenistan. Notably missing from this list is Russia and some of its former dependencies who have managed to take a capitalist invention, integrate it, then retrofit their networks. The retrofitting, an endeavor that Russia tested publicly in December 2019, allows their central government to have a kill switch that would isolate the Russian portions of the network. This also brought into question its censorship capabilities as they exercised control over all domestic incoming and outgoing Internet communications.
Belarus is the newest oppressive regime to take control of its domestic network as they interface with the global Internet. Civil unrest in the former Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic has reached a new boiling point after recent disputed elections, with the beating and jailing of politicians who had dared to oppose the election of President Alexander Lukashenko. Citizens by the hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets of Minsk to protest who the world sees as a brutal military dictator. In the height of the protests, the regime pulled all foreign reporters’ visas and deported every single one of them. Unknown to the rest of the world, Lukashenko’s government then implemented technology from a company called Sandvine out of Plano, Texas, to block access to social media platforms, messaging services, and any other sites that would allow citizens to report the realities of their brutal crackdown. The block put in place uses a technology called deep packet inspection, something so effective and so pervasive, that it caught the attention of networking specialists from around the world. It was discovered shortly thereafter that Sandvine had skirted US law, at best, or violated US law, at worst, by allowing their hardware and software to be sold and used in such a way.
The last example brings into focus the fact that oppressive regimes aren’t necessarily undemocratic, like the country of India. A recent MIT Technology Review Podcast details how the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 lets India shutdown the Internet and other telecommunications to control what it sees as political dissent or civil unrest. For six months last year, as an example, the state of Kashmir was without Internet, television, or cellular phone services. Even after the block was lifted, only calling associated with 2G service was supplied. In Kashmir and other areas, the Indian central government has exercised this power to a great detriment of the local economies.
Consider all the information taken-in and all the economic activity conducted through television, mobile phones, and the Internet in general; then imagine all of it just stops for days, weeks, or months on end. Not because the cable company needs to repair a line, but because they’re being punished by the equivalent of their very own Federal Government. Thanks in large part to how our Federal Constitution is set up, and in part to how the Internet grew semi-organically from disparate interconnected networks, implementing nationwide censorship would be both expensive and impractical. Despotic regimes took advantage by either nationalizing existing infrastructure or building their country’s own first telecommunications infrastructure from the ground up, to build in their censorship controls. I’m happy to say we have a solution, Net Neutrality and laws supporting it are the best ways to prevent this from happening in all countries, democratic or otherwise.
