The Web Won’t Topple Tyranny
TNR Online | Dictatorship.com.
by Joshua Kurlantzick. The New Republic.
Post date: 03.25.04,
Issue date: 04.05.04.
This article discusses why the Internet is not
“naturally independent of the tyrannies [that governments] impose on us”
as John Perry Barlow and others have been hoping.
Why?
In part because, as a medium, the Web is in many ways ill-suited for expressing and organizing dissent. And, even more significantly, because, as a technology, it has proved surprisingly easy for authoritarian regimes to stifle, control, and co-opt.
With the help of American companies that sell the
latest censorship technology and others that willingly censor their own news content to appease
authoritarian regimes, the Internet has become, in some ways, more of a hinderance to than a promoter of progress.
Kurlantzick reviews the problems, cites examples and the little research that exists. He ends somewhat hopefully noting the ways in which “in the long run, the Internet may fulfill some of its hype as an engine of liberalization.”