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By Root 1790 0

communities, it’s hard to find a technology company that does not have a connection to the CIA or some other three-lettered agency. Even though Google does not publicize this widely, Keyhole, the predecessor to Google Earth, which Google bought in 2005, was funded through In-Q-Tel, which is the CIA’s for-profit investment arm. That Google Earth is somehow a CIAFUNDED vehicle for destroying the world is a recurring theme in rare comments given by those working in security agencies of other countries. Lt. Gen. Leonid Sazhin of the Russian Federal Security Service was not just speaking for Russia when he expressed his frustration in 2005: “Terrorists don’t need to reconnoitre their target. Now an American company is working for them.” It doesn’t help that In-Q-Tel has recently invested in a company that monitors buzz on Twitter, supposedly to give the intelligence community “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” as its spokesperson put it. In July 2010 both In-Q-Tel and Google jointly invested in the same social media monitoring company, triggering even more rumors and conspiracy theories. Whatever the motives, the perception it creates is that there is a tight connection between the much-feared CIA and the buzz created on social media; many authoritarian leaders haven’t forgotten that Radio Free Europe was initially funded by the CIA and that the original name of Radio Liberty was Radio Liberation. So the fear that the CIA is in the business of funding revolutionary media is not entirely unfounded.

The stronger the perception that American companies are tools for accomplishing the objectives of the U.S. government, the more resistant foreign governments will be to those companies doing business in their countries. This will inevitably push these governments to invest in their own equivalent of popular American online services or find ways to discriminate against foreign firms to bolster domestic industry. In late 2009 Turkey announced a plan to give a government-run email account to every citizen as well as to launch a search engine that would better respond to “Turkish sensibilities.” Iran promptly followed Turkey’s path in February 2010, announcing a similar national email plan after banning Gmail; the Iranian authorities also announced their plans for a national search engine in the summer of 2010. A month later, the Russian government announced that it, too, was considering giving every citizen a government-run email account, if only to make it easier to identify them when they deal with the increasingly electronic government. As already noted, Russian politicians have also been seriously considering creating a government-run search engine, to challenge Google’s rapid growth in the country; according to Russian media, $100 million has been disbursed for that purpose.

John Perry Barlow, a cyber-utopian former lyricist of the Grateful Dead, who in 1996 wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” a libertarian manifesto for the digital age, likes to point out that “in cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance.” This, however, may have been just a temporary equilibrium that could soon go away as other foreign governments discover that they would rather not have America own key parts of the infrastructure of the information society. The moment Western—and, in this case, predominantly American—policymakers start talking about embracing the geopolitical potential of the Internet, everyone else reconsiders the wisdom of letting the Americans keep the Internet to themselves, in terms of both Washington’s dominant role in Internet governance and Silicon Valley’s market leadership.

Just as important is the fact that local Chinese and Russian Internet companies may offer far better and more useful web services by the sheer virtue of knowing the demands of their respective Internet cultures. As such, they have proved successful at attracting local audiences and, more important, complying with the censorship requests of their own governments. The politicization of Web 2.0 services