Foreign Affairs Friday: Internet

The big story this week is Google's announcement that it no longer wants to go along with Chinese requirements that it censor search results on its Chinese website. It agreed to do this when it entered China four years ago as a condition of gaining access to its market. This announcement comes after some parties in China tried to hack into the e-mail accounts of human rights activists there.

I think this is a good move by Google. The internet is a great boon to the people of the world, but a great threat to authoritarian regimes, because they need to control information, and the internet is very hard to control. In places like Iran, when protests erupt, the government hinders or shuts down internet and cell phone networks, in hopes of preventing coordination among protesters. China tries to limit access to information not approved by the government, like the truth about Tiananmen Square. Google's move is a public rebuke of internet censorship.

In Thomas Friedman's latest paean to China (he thinks quite highly of their government), he explains that the Communist Party "has a political class focused on addressing its real problems" (unlike the US, he implicitly says - but he has a point there). However, their biggest problem is maintaining control over the populace while keeping the economy open to the world. It's easy to keep people in the dark in North Korea when your economy is completely severed from the rest of the world, but China has to maintain business contacts abroad and internet access domestically to keep its economy running. But these contacts allow subversive information about topics like democracy and natural rights to percolate through society. China's government must keep the lid on the pressure cooker of informed, unhappy citizens in order to stay in power.

This is where the US has some leverage. While we are limited right now in what we can do militarily and financially, we can achieve results with some technology. As Nicholas Kristof suggests:

China’s Netizens scale the Great Firewall of China with virtual private networks and American-based proxy servers like Freegate. (The United States should support these efforts with additional server capacity as a way of promoting free information and undermining censorship by China and Iran).

Secretary of State Clinton will be giving a speech on internet freedom next week, and it's clear that her office is in discussions with Google about its position in China. Hopefully Clinton will forcefully support freedom of the internet, and announce that the US will take steps to ensure that citizens of repressive nations can regularly access it. This would be a low-cost step to help support democratic movements in these countries. If such efforts were to assist in getting rid of the Iranian regime, for example, or force more openness in China, that would be of great benefit to the United States and the world.