World wide wash.

• Author: Thompson, Nicholas
• Position: Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule - Book Review

OPEN NETWORKS, CLOSED REGIMES The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule by Shanti Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas Carnegie Endownment for International Peace, $18.95

I RECENTLY ASKED OXBLOOD Ruffin, a programmer working to help dissidents who use the Internet to skirt repressive governments, about efforts to foment digitally borne subversion in China. Alas, he said, Chinese Internet users care more about slipping past pornographic censors than political Ones. "There's a sort of Western romance associated with Web censorship that imagines all those poor folks in China, Iran, etc., just can't wait to get to CNN. Although this is true for some people, many more are lining up to get into the school for one-handed typing."

Unfortunately, as Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas argue in their fascinating and extremely useful new book, Open Networks, Closed Regimes, that shouldn't surprise. The Internet hasn't really helped global democracy, and it hasn't built a global civil society either. In some countries, authoritarian governments have even been able to use the Internet to entrench themselves, gleefully reversing Ronald Reagan's 1988 assertion that "the Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip." In other words, sometimes the Net helps the good guys; sometimes it helps the bad guys--and quite often, it does nothing.

Kalathil and Boas derive their argument from analyzing eight authoritarian countries with varied strategies for controlling the Internet. Cuba, for example, forces many users to connect to a national intranet instead of the World Wide Web and blocks non-supportive organizations from getting online. It also uses the Internet quite effectively to spread its own propaganda: "Internet development has largely proceeded beneficially for Cuba's authoritarian regime," write the authors.

Burma, on the other hand, just shuts off access from the rest of the world and carefully monitors what little it allows. In the United Arab Emirates, the government plays "a cat and mouse game of moderate intensity," blocking pornography and some political Sites, though not really cracking down on violators.

But no matter a particular government's strategy, in all eight case studies the house wins, and the Internet fails to provide a possible back door to transformation. In a telling example, the authors argue that the greatest threat posed to countries in the Middle East may well be that e-government makes governments...