Three years after Facebook-friendly dissidents took to the streets of Tehran and made techno-optimists giddy about the Internet’s liberating potential, things have gotten bleak. Once again, the mullahs are taking on democracy-minded netizens — but nowadays, the government is the one getting creative with technology. And they’re winning, doing things to Internet access that makes China’s “Great Firewall” seem tame.The situation is relatively straightforward: Iran is building its own anti-Internet. The government has variously described it as the “clean Internet,” the “halal Internet,” or, more plainly, the “national Internet.” It’ll be an intranet, looped inside the country and populated only with Iranian-hosted (and, of course, regime-approved) sites.Iran isn’t alone. North Korea and Cuba already have national intranets, and Turkmenistan and Burma have had things that were functionally the same for years. But is there any kind of remote possibility that the US, Western Europe, Japan, or any other place that prides itself on freedom could opt to build a bottled network? Are we really that far off?For an article in Sunday’s Boston Globe about the state-controlled anti-Internets that repressive regimes are using around the world, I spoke to Internet thinkers Douglas Rushkoff and Clay Shirky about those very questions. And while they didn’t say we were on the path to techno-totalitarianism, they had some sobering words of caution.Rushkoff was especially intrigued by the fact that part of Iran’s strategy is to make the national intranet faster and more reliable than the Internet (which the government already keeps artificially slow) and to fill it with entertaining content like videos and games. The Internet will still be available in Iran — but it’ll be a chore to use by comparison. Rushkoff said Americans could look to their own pockets and handbags for a parallel.“Your iPhone is a closed system, right?” he said. “It’s a closed universe. You try to open it, that’s called ‘jailbreaking.’ It’s voluntarily closed. At least, at first it’s voluntarily closed, and then it’s just closed because we don’t know any different.”
Of course Rushkoff’s isn’t a direct comparison: your iPhone can access any information that’s available on the open Web, provided you don’t live in a place like China. But the point stands — iOS is, by and large, a walled-off ecosystem, and users are only too happy to let Apple curate their experiences, at the cost of things like freedom, usability and the environment. Sacrificing privacy and free choice isn’t alien to American device-users — indeed, it’s become ubiquitous to the point where the tradeoff hardly crosses most people’s minds."Everything we do in America becomes part of a big data search," Rushkoff added. "Americans accept iPhones and Google and Facebook and all of the compromises that we accept because it's easy to watch movies or whatever."
A bit of a cynical view of human nature, to be sure. But then again, when was the last time you read through an End-User License Agreement? And what percentage of your time on the Internet is spent on political agitation for free speech? Speaking of free speech, Shirky sees the Iranian intranet as, simultaneously, a leap forward and a leap backward for the world's open networks — the key lies in the mullahs' ability to sell what they build. After all, isn't a state-controlled network the easiest way to totally monitor a network user's activities?"Once it becomes possible to spy on everybody, it's very, very hard to forego the opportunity," Shirky said. "The risk is that a market for the tools of surveillance and censorship created by the autocratic countries will lead to blowback in the Western world as Western governments find the catnip of the fantasy of communications control too appealing to forego."
In short, pieces of the Iranian model, elements of that closed network, could end up on shopping lists for governments everywhere. They’re already here — schools, government agencies and Fortune 500 companies already rely on censored internet networks. Ultra-Orthodox Jews from Boro Park to Lakewood rely on software that prohibits web browsing to either white lists or black lists, and recently turned out in droves in Queens to rally in support of a more Kosher internet. Hey, Chris Dodd has already said how much he admires parts of China's Great Firewall — who's to say a SOPA-phile wouldn't point out the useful aspects of the halal Internet?"It's relatively easier to be committed to freedom of speech if you can't watch what everybody's doing," Shirky cautioned. "But in a world in which telesurveillance is possible, freedom of speech requires active, daily commitment, rather than just an acceptance that you can't get what you want. And that's a real risk."
And, of course, it's always easier for citizens of a democracy to let go of certain liberties in the face of danger. Rushkoff sees the US/Israeli cyberwar against Iran as the opening salvo in what could become a dangerous spiral. What if Iran — or any entity, for that matter — were to fire its own Stuxnet into a Western democracy?"If you can create a picture of the Internet where you're in danger, where your files and your bank accounts and everything else is in one sort of danger or another, then, sure, you're going to seek the safe haven of protected spaces," Rushkoff said. In other words, you might be willing to put yourself in a bottled network if you thought the bottle was bulletproof.
And yet, despite all this dour pessimism – most of which, of course, was pure speculation — Rushkoff and Shirky were not without hope. Rushkoff pointed out that very few systems can ever be fully "closed" – as soon as one node of a network can access another network, no matter how small and under-used that node is, the network is no longer closed.Shirky had a less theoretical note of optimism. He, in fact, was somewhat glad that the Iranians were building an alternative network."When a country like Iran says, essentially, 'We're taking our marbles and going home because we can't impose the speech restrictions we want on the rest of the Internet, we're therefore going to disconnect from the rest of the Internet'" Shirky said. "Frankly, given the way that they want the Internet to run, it would be better to have them disconnect than try and export their goals."The Web is still, for the most part, open. The walled-off networks — from North Korea's kwangmyŏng to the Pentagon's SIPRNET — are few and far between. But hey: a tiny bit of paranoia on the Internet never hurt anybody, right?
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An Iranian computer-user (Courtesy The Los Angeles Times)
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A sample page from EcuRed, the Cuban intranet’s Wikipedia knock-off
A North Korean computer user (Courtesy AFP)
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Netizens in Turkmenistan, where the government has hobbled the Internet to the point where it’s essentially just an intranet (Courtesy Radio Free Europe)
An Internet cafe in Burma, where the recently ousted military junta used a “whitelisting” program that only allowed certain sites to enter the country — therefore turning the Internet into a, yeah, kind of intranet (Courtesy AFP)
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