The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [117]
It took a letter from the U.S. Treasury Department to convince BlueHost to change its practices. Similar overcompliance is still common among Internet companies. In April 2009 the popular social networking site LinkedIn decided to ban all Syrian users from its site, citing U.S. sanctions. After its CEO saw that such a move led to a lot of LinkedIn bashing in the blogosphere, he reversed the decision, explaining that it was the result of overzealous interpretation of existing regulations.
That most sanctions imposed by the United States on unruly governments fail to accomplish their goals is, of course, an open secret in Washington and beyond. But the futility of such sanctions in regulating technology is even more apparent. To assume that the leaders of Belarus or Zimbabwe would be bothering to purchase services from American hosting companies while they can easily get them from their domestic (and often state-controlled) firms is simply ridiculous. The chasm between the U.S. government’s rhetoric on Internet freedom and the reality of their own restrictions on the exports of technology has not been lost even on authoritarian states, which, on multiple occasions, have used it to bolster their own propaganda that Washington doesn’t mean what it says (in 2009, a government newspaper in China deplored the U.S. government for not allowing the downloads of MSN messenger in Cuba). But there are many other reasons why such sanctions need to go; whatever its real role and significance in the Iranian protests, had Twitter complied with the letter of the law in the summer of 2009, it might have deprived Americans of an important channel of information. (Some lawyers speculate that this would have bordered closely on what they call “prior restraint” and may have even violated the First Amendment.)
The ineffectiveness of sanctions has, of course, rarely stopped American leaders from embarking on quixotic adventures. Still, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that a campaign to promote Internet freedom around the globe loses much of its allure when the U.S. government itself creates so many hurdles for people who want but are unable to take full advantage of the Internet. One danger of making Internet freedom into a guiding orientation for the Western impetus to promote democracy is that it diverts attention away from the misdeeds and poor policies of Western governments themselves, focusing almost exclusively on the draconian Internet controls of authoritarian governments. As the situation in Iran so aptly demonstrated, with the U.S. State Department asking a company to continue providing the services it shouldn’t have been providing in the first place, even American officials can get lost in their own policies and sanctions. Until those are simplified and purged of unnecessary hurdles, the Internet is only working at half of its fully democratizing capacity.
A Doll with Censored Nipples
In 2008 the Moroccan government’s fear of the Internet made international headlines after it jailed Fouad Mourtada, a Moroccan engineer who had supposedly set up a fake Facebook profile for Prince Moulay Rachid, one of the country’s rulers. It never became clear how the Moroccan government traced Mourtada; some commentators even accused Facebook of turning him in. Given Facebook’s reputation with the government,