Internet and Politics - Despotic Regimes and Internet Censorship

The Internet is impossible to censor, right? Not if you are a despotic regime throwing all your resources into it. You won't stop everyone and everything, but if the aim is to prevent enough citizens from getting free speech to topple your regime, then you can succeed.

For a start, people can't access the Internet using just brainwaves. They need a computer connected to a wired or wireless phone line. Stopping someone getting access to that, and you stop their Internet.

Most countries ruled by authoritarian regimes are poor and have low telephone penetration. There are fewer than nine phone lines per thousand people in China, and three in Vietnam. It is pretty obvious that unlike people in democratic nations, few Vietnamese or Chinese can walk into their study room and log on. Some office workers might have access at work, but someone will likely walk past as they are surfing. The majority of the population must go to Internet cafés.

It was at an Internet café in Hanoi that Vietnamese Internet dissident Le Chi Quang was caught by the secret police in February 2002, after the state-owned Internet backbone company FTP spotted Quang, who had posted an article criticising Hanoi's secret donating of land near the border to appease the Chinese regime. In June that year, the regime told all Internet café owners to report on customers accessing blocked sites.

The same thing happened in the South. In Saigon in March 2003, democracy activist Dr Nguyen Dan Que, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, was caught, again at an Internet café. Both Quang and Que are presently in prison.

Even if every household had a telephone and everyone had a computer, free speech could still be blocked. Because the Internet backbones in these countries are controlled by the Communist Parties, it is quite easy for them to block sites. As the Net's secret police put on more and more filters, Net-literate dissidents find more and more ways to work around them. But as all this goes on, it gets harder and harder for less Net-literate people to play the game.

The effect, then, is that only a small minority of the population can get around the authorities. And revolutions cannot be started and maintained by small minorities.

For democracy to be built up in these countries, millions of their ordinary citizens must be able to be exposed in their daily life to concepts of democracy and freedom.