The Internet: The Tip Of The Spear For Democracy

Some members of Congress were as excited about Google (GOOG) leaving China as founder Sergey Brin was. Brin said that the repressive regime in the People’s Republic reminded him of his homeland the Soviet Union. It seems a thin sentiment on which to make a potentially multi-billion decision.

Members of Google’s management testified before a House committee and urged the US government to engage countries such as China on internet freedom. In the minds of the search company’s executives, it is a matter of digital free speech.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google has even encouraged the federal government to fund the creation of software that would make online censorship more difficult in countries that block access to some websites and data.

Whether people can get on the internet in nations which are dictatorships may be as important as whether they can watch TV or listen to the radio as they please, but clearly well short of issues like wrongful imprisonment and torture. The US is willing to go to war to effect regime changes in place like Iraq. Or, as some would charge, America is simply there to protects its own strategic interests in the region which would include access to crude oil.

A free internet everywhere in the world is probably of real benefit to the US. Foreigners can have access to Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Don Imus. And that is the trouble. A free internet opens the digital infrastructure of the world to both CNN and ranting lunatics.

America ends up engaging China across a broad series of issues from global warming to the value of the the yuan to the treatment of prisoners held by the central government. And, the case that information is hard to get in China may be an academic one. Even in the People’s Republic, a man can put a crude satellite dish on his home and get CNN and the Playboy Channel.

The internet is a means of transmission, but it is not a means of promoting knowledge or a taste for political freedom of the satisfaction or an interest in pornography. That is the mission of content which has its own way of seeping into the cracks in rocks and breaking them when the air freezes. A fight for a free internet is a fight for a medium and not a message.

–Douglas McIyntyre