In the early days of the Arab Spring, Wael Ghonim declared, “If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.”
In retrospect Ghonim, a well-known Egyptian activist at the center of Cairo protests, should not have stopped there. Just giving a society the Internet isn’t enough to set it free.
As pro-democracy and social justice movements have taken root on the Web, they’ve been challenged by official efforts to remake networks into tools of censorship and exclusion.
In Ghonim’s Egypt, the protesters’ optimism about the Internet after the fall of President Mubarak has sunk under the current Sisi regime, which has silenced dissident voices in online media and imprisoned dozens of journalists.
In 2014, Egypt’s Interior Ministry drafted legislation to censor websites that “instigate terrorism.” Sites the ministry singled out for monitoring included Facebook, which has become a popular channel for Egyptians to report local news, connect with a larger community and voice their dissent.
The pattern repeated itself in Turkey, where Gezi Park protests in 2013 were the country’s high-water mark for online organizing. After clearing the park, the Erdogan government imposed a ban on Twitter and YouTube. And though a constitutional court decision later rescinded the ban, the repression hasn’t stopped. The regime has shuttered local websites without court orders and collected Web-browsing data on individuals who’ve spoken out.
In Hong Kong last fall, organizers of the Occupy Central movement used mobile Apps such as FireChat, which enabled smartphones to connect directly to each other, bypassing cellular or Wi-Fi connections that are far easier to monitor.
In response, Hong Kong and Beijing authorities created their own deceptive App, containing spyware that would record users’ phone calls, scan emails, capture contacts, and track their geographical position. Authorities reportedly attached the App to pro-democracy texts urging recipients to download it.
In the years since Ghonim’s enthusiastic remarks, communications for protest movements has evolved into a digital game of cat and mouse. Journalists and activists are devising ingenious new ways to get around digital blockades and filters, while authorities deploy new snooping technologies to turn the Web into a tool of repression.
This uneasy balance serves as the backdrop for another battle. It’s a fight not playing out between smartphone packing protesters and security forces, but among the Internet governance community – a globe-trotting tribe of non-governmental organizations (or NGOs), international agencies, world leaders and corporate CEOs.
For as long as the World Wide Web has existed these groups have debated its control and administration. What rules should govern a network that transcends national boundaries to connect people everywhere?
It’s a discussion – replete with international agency acronyms and jargon (“multistakeholderism” anyone?) – that leaves the rest of us scratching our heads.
Where Some are More Equal
Many leading voices in Internet governance gathered over the weekend at the World Economic Forum in Davos. During opening sessions, top executives from Google and Facebook made their claims to the fate of the Internet, declaring that the connectivity offered by their companies helps reduce inequalities and injustices worldwide.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, told a Davos crowd that access to tools like her company’s social media platform has fostered “global transformations” that are “happening faster than ever before.”
“Now everyone has a voice,” Sandberg said. “Now everyone can post, everyone can share and that gives a voice to people who have historically not had it.”
Asked during a session whether the Internet is helping or hurting people, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt drew an analogy to an earlier technology. “It’s the same that happened to the people who lost their farming jobs when the tractor came,” he said. “But ultimately a globalized solution means more equality for everyone.”
The Internet prophecies of Sandberg and Schmidt fall flat when weighed against the realities of a world where approximately 60 percent of the population is not online.
And even though the number of people to use the Internet has more than doubled worldwide since 2006, the values held by democracies have been in steady retreat.
In a 2014 survey, Freedom House found that political rights and civil liberties had declined globally for the eighth consecutive year. This marked the longest period of decline since the organization began its reporting nearly 45 years ago.
Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube have given a voice to hundreds of millions of people. But they’re also media that offer speakers few clear protections.
The New Republic’s Jeffrey Rosen has reported on a cadre of twenty-something “deciders” employed by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube who determine what content gets blocked on their platforms. While they seem earnest in their regard for free speech and social justice, they often make decisions on issues that are way beyond their depth, affecting people in parts of the world they’ve never been to.
Filling the Vacuum
Too often, a social justice approach has been absent from these high-level discussions about the Internet, says Parminder Jeet Singh, Executive Director of IT for Change. “Techies wield considerable social and political power and they, regrettably, are just not the social justice kinds in the traditional movements way.”
At the same time Internet-enabled democracy and justice movements are spreading across the planet, the Davos set has been reluctant to embrace the more disruptive demands of these protesters, according to Singh.
“In that vacuum has stepped a queer mix of messianic, global Internet businesses, techie groups seeking to retain social and political power,” he said in an email interview. Also included “are some specialized professional NGO groups, many of them heavily funded by both economic and political forces that are dominant and therefore prefer the status quo.”
On the day the World Economic Forum opened, Singh’s IT for Change announced a coalition of civil society organizations focused on connecting the global Internet freedom movement to people everywhere.
The coalition is organized around the belief that the Internet must evolve in the public’s interest with full participation by the billions of Internet users not in the mix at Davos.
It plans to build a global network of grassroots groups that can better organize and amplify the concerns of those people often on the wrong side of the digital divide. The coalition plans also to convene the first Internet Social Forum later this year.
The Internet is simply an effective tool for connecting people. Whether the network becomes a force for good or evil is up to its users.
It’s only because millions of people have mobilized in defense of our rights to connect and communicate that the Internet pendulum occasionally swings toward doing good.
It’s these people, and not those in Davos, who will ultimately save the Internet.
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