The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [114]
While policymakers shouldn’t ignore the multiple successes of activists who have used the Internet and social media to their advantage around the globe, from campaigning against Pervez Musharaf in Pakistan to shaming Shell about its dubious activities in Nigeria to fighting misogynist fundamentalists in India, they should also remember that, even when successful, such campaigns always come with hidden social, cultural, and political costs. This is even more relevant if they target a powerful authoritarian state. One of the main reasons why the anti-FARC protests were so successful in Colombia was because they were opposing a group much hated by the Colombian government. When the same group of activists used their Facebook know-how to launch similar anti-Chavez protests in Venezuela in September 2009, expecting up to sixty million people to join the protests all over the globe, only a few thousand actually showed up (that Chavez launched a smart propaganda campaign and countered with “grassroots” protests of his own did not help either). Whenever Hillary Clinton touts the power of social networking to change the world and David Miliband, her former British counterpart, speaks of “civilian surge” and muses on how new media can help “fuel the drive for social justice,” one should scrutinize those claims closely. While it may be true that new forms of activism are emerging, they may be eroding rather than augmenting older, more effective forms of activism and organizing.
chapter eight
Open Networks, Narrow Minds: Cultural Contradictions of Internet Freedom
For all the praise that American diplomats heaped on Twitter for its prominent role in the Iranian protests of 2009, one extremely ironic development has gone largely unnoticed: by allowing Iranians to share photos and videos from the streets of Tehran, Twitter’s executives may have violated U.S. law. Few of Twitter’s cheerleaders in the media paid any attention to the fact that the tough sanctions imposed by the U.S. government on Iran extend to American technology companies, including those offering Internet services to ordinary Iranians.
In fact, these American sanctions, administered predominantly by the Department of Treasury and Department of Commerce, far away from the cyber-utopian offices of the State Department, have hurt the development of the Iranian Internet as much as the brutal crackdowns of the Iranian police. Until March 2010, almost a year after the protests, Iranians could not legally download Google’s Chrome browser, place calls on Skype, or chat via MSN messenger. All these services (and many more) were subject to a rather byzantine set of restrictions imposed by the U.S. government. Some could have been overcome, but most American companies chose not to bother; such fights would be too expensive to mount, while the profits they would make by selling online advertising to Iranians didn’t seem lucrative enough.
Most Iranian opposition groups have a hard time finding an American company willing to host their websites; those who have more luck with European or Asian firms cannot easily pay for them, as U.S.-based online payment systems like PayPal do not offer their services to Iranians. Even more bizarrely, those who want to pierce Iran’s numerous firewalls by circumventing government blocks of sites like Twitter cannot easily do so, as the export of anticensorship tools also falls within the scope of the sanctions regime. Furthermore, most technologies that feature encryption are subject to a complex set of