Internet content censors (read countries) are rearing their ugly heads again — sometimes in the garb of protecting their citizens and especially children, and at other times, claiming to protect national interests.
Cyberspace, on the other hand, knows no boundaries. By providing information across geographical barriers through the billions of mobiles and personal computers (PCs), it can enlighten, challenge and even disrupt preconceived notions of people and nations. Many countries find the information very unsettling, and interpret it as “interference” in their domestic affairs. China, for instance, asked search giant Google to censor its search content. Not buckling under pressure, Google instead has begun redirecting search queries from within China to its Hong Kong site. The governments in Teheran, Havana, and Khartoum, too, exert varying degrees of control over the internet, and are expected to continue to do so. Iran, this February, had said it would impose a permanent block on Gmail. And now there’s a lot of furore over the Australian government’s plan to begin filtering internet content. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are among many high-tech companies that have objected to the move. The fight, however, does not appear to be against technology companies. Rather, it is an age-old fight against “US hegemony”, “Western interference” and “democracy” itself. Technology companies, being the vehicles of new-age tools, have catapulted this debate onto a larger platform — the internet. Washington, for instance, introduced sanctions on countries like Iran when (after the June elections in Iran) video-sharing sites like Google’s YouTube and social networking and micro-blogging sites like Facebook and Twitter were used by Iranians to organise protests and inform the rest of the world about brutal government crackdowns on demonstrators. It was only on March 8 that the US Treasury Department eased sanctions, allowing US companies to export services to those countries that are related to internet communication.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had then said that the easing of sanctions was aimed at opening an information floodgate into repressive societies like Iran by allowing American firms to provide the technology without violating US law. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, said he wanted to use this ploy to deliver a “punch” to Western powers on the anniversary of the Islamic revolution. Tech companies get caught in the fire. Google’s decision to move out of China, for instance, is not easy from a demand point of view. China remains a very huge market. Hong Kong enjoys special legal rights that most of China does not (under the “one country, two systems” approach), allowing Google to remain technically inside of China but free to offer an uncensored search engine. But the vast majority of Chinese internet users sit behind The Great Firewall of China, which gives the Chinese government the ability to restrict certain websites from appearing on computers in China (although, there are smart guys who can crack any firewall). Google very much wants to remain part of the Chinese internet market, which is already the world’s largest, despite the fact that only 25 per cent of the country is actively using the internet. China’s internet user number reached 338 million by the end of June 2009 (currently much over 350 million), according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).
In 2008, China overtook the US as the largest fixed broadband market in the world. Google’s presence in that market will likely be dictated by Chinese internet censors, who are already understood to have started blocking clicks to search results on Google.com.hk. India, meanwhile, may emerge a huge beneficiary of this internet-based geopolitics. The country has comparatively fewer internet connections but is the second-largest mobile market in the world after China. And the internet is being increasingly accessed on mobiles. India and China together account for over 1.2 billion mobiles of the 4.6 billion global mobile users. The US and Russia follow with just around 500 million cellphones.
