Egypt Proves We Need a New Net
by Douglas Rushkoff
Some of us might like to believe that the genie is out of the bottle and that we all have access to an unstoppable decentralized network. In reality, the internet is entirely controlled by central authorities.
Old media, such as terrestrial radio and television, were as distributed as the thousands of stations and antennae from which broadcast signals emanated, but all internet traffic must pass through government and corporate-owned choke points.
That’s why President Hosni Mubarak’s regime had so little trouble shutting down his citizens’ networks when he wanted to. One phone call to each of the four internet service providers in his country was all it took. And while we might like to believe that couldn’t happen in the United States, we should remember that all it took was a call from Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Connecticut, to Amazon for the corporation to shut down WikiLeaks’ website recently.
Meanwhile, UK’s Vodaphone complied with Mubarak’s orders first to turn off cell phone use in Egypt, and later to flood cell phone users with incendiary pro-government messages. More virtual ink was spilled in the United States about Vodaphone-partner Verizon’s version of the iPhone than on Vodaphone’s utter complicity in the violence fomented by the commands it promoted through its networks. Although Vodaphone continues to apologize publicly for its ongoing policy of serving the goon squads of a dictatorial regime, it has also continued to follow that regime’s orders.
If bottom-up networks are this dependent on the good graces of top-down authorities for their very functioning, then how bottom-up are they? While in the United States we may have policies protecting free speech and open communication, it is these laws — and not some feature of our internet — that prevent the kinds of censorship we are witnessing in Egypt.
And, as we saw when push came to shove over WikiLeaks in the United States, how quickly this very same authority can be used to cut off “enemies of the state” from access and funding.
