Again with the Internet Freedom?
Washington Post: “The Click That Broke a Government’s Grip”
Particularly relevant to our discussion in class last week, eh? So it would seem that the Internet in China is not quite as well-controlled as their government would have the rest of the world think. One man was able to post information to a network of some 111 million Chinese Internet users, information that the government was unable to use its vaunted filtering technologies to prevent from disseminating.
It just goes to show that perhaps the argument that the Internet inherently has the potential to democratize a nation holds more weight than some might think. If just one person can stand up to an authoritarian dictatorship (and lose his job in the process) using the power of the Internet, what is to stop others from doing the same? Well, losing their job I guess, but here’s hoping that other opportunities will arise. The free and transparent exchange of information is one of the cornerstones of any free nation with a participatory government. In this new age of technological revolution instead of violent uprisings with muskets (the American Revolution) or even rifles (Vietnam)… information, and the free spread thereof becomes the new catalyst for change. I believe that history has shown us: new times require such new paradigms for change. Apartheid was not ended using the methods of the past, nor was the idea of mass propaganda ignored during World War 2. This will not be an overwhelmingly fast (some would say “violent”) change, but as the article points out: this has happened before, and it will probably happen again.
As we have previously said in class, there is an argument to be made that the Internet is inherently a Libertarian system. Its very structure is a distributed one, with no massive concentration of singular power. This allows a single voice to be both lost in the noise, but also to be amplified with a power more than a million times greater than that of its own. That is the power of the Internet, and I am not at all surprised that a country even as powerful as China can’t contain it. Furthermore, I believe that the debate over the practices of Google, Yahoo, and other American companies overseas becomes increasingly irrelevant if the free-market structure which the Internet itself embodies continues to pervade countries like China. Hopefully our own government will stand up and take notice that immediate and forceful action is not always required to solve an international situation we disagree with.