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By Root 1855 0

being asked to believe that the Internet, too, is apolitical, even though the very technology CEOs enlisted to spread the gospel of Internet freedom around the world have to regularly comply with the growing demands of the U.S. National Security Agency. If history is anything to judge by, such sheer duplicity has rarely been of much help in accomplishing the objectives of American foreign policy. The point is not that the U.S. government should avoid exploiting the fact that so many popular Internet companies are American but that, in exploiting it, diplomats should not lose sight of the fact that these companies are American, with all the biases and expectations that such label elicits.

But another fallacy is often at play as well: By looking at authoritarian states, Western observers often notice (false) similarities to their own processes and problems. Mamoun Fandy, a U.S.-based, Saudi-born scholar of Middle Eastern politics, notes that “the main problem arises when we mistake the means and the processes for mirror images of Western structures accompanied by specific expected functions: in other words, seeing only what is familiar and selecting data on the basis of this familiarity.” In other words, since policymakers believe that bloggers can make politicians more accountable in the context of democratic politics in the West, they tend to believe that such outcomes are unavoidable in other contexts. But this is not a given, and so many of the processes we see do not reflect the fundamental structural changes we take for granted. Or as Fandy so insightfully observes, “to see a debate similar to the American show Crossfire does not mean that freedom of speech in the Arab world is fully realized, any more than to see voting and ballot boxes means that democracy has taken hold.”

Unfortunately, it does appear that whoever suggested that Secretary Clinton use the term “Internet freedom” must have been either short on metaphors or naïve about world politics. This is not to say that there are no threats to the openness of the Internet or the security of its users; it’s just that there were probably much better, less political, and more intellectually coherent ways to bring all of those problems to global attention without instilling American’s own politicians with a false sense of accomplishment.

chapter nine

Internet Freedoms and Their Consequences

The millions of tourists passing through India’s Hindu temples every day probably have no idea they’re being filmed. The cameras are there not to spy but to broadcast religious rituals over the Internet, allowing those who are unable to travel to the temple to participate remotely.

The digitization of India’s religious practices has spawned a number of related online businesses. Saranam.com, for example, charges from $4 to $300 to perform a whole menu of religious ceremonies in virtually any temple in the country. If you are too busy to travel to the temple yourself, a small fee enables one of Saranam’s “franchisees” to perform the required religious services on your behalf. E-Darshan.org, another Indian innovation that was probably inspired by YouTube, aggregates videos of rituals held in the most famous temples throughout the country and broadcasts some of the rituals in real time as well.

India is hardly unique here. In China, a start-up called china-tomb.cn is capitalizing on the rapidly growing demand for online mourning services. The Chinese have a custom of visiting their relatives’ memorials and tombs during the Qingming festival; this tomb-sweeping tradition has been part of the Chinese tradition since the eighth century. Travel within China is often impractical. Thus a new generation of websites charges mourners a small fee (just a little bit over a dollar) to set up virtual alternatives and sweep them over the Web. Chinese Internet users also have a wide choice of online cemeteries, full of online memorial halls, e-tombstones, e-incenses, and e-flowers (some of the cemeteries were launched by the Chinese government in the early 2000s). These options for