Democracy and the Internet

Noam Chomsky (portait on the right), an MIT professor emeritus, renowned linguist and political activist, gave an interview to Andrew Marr on media censorship and propaganda. It is available on YouTube:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

About six and a half minutes into the third part, the Internet is mentioned. Chomsky says there is a struggle going on about whether Internet will be a democratising media or not. And I think there are a lot of interesting things to discuss about this matter.

First of all there is the problem about access, which Chomsky mentions. Most people do not have access to the Internet (about 78 % of the world population). Unsurprisingly, it is people in the poorer regions of the world who do not have access. And in those regions I should think the wealthy elite are the ones with access. So on global matters, the views expressed on the Internet will have a very large bias.

Laying aside the issue of access. From a technical point of view, the Internet has a democratic core structure. It is decentralised and each computer on it can connect to any other (lest there be a firewall in between). For communications between multiple machines there are both centralised (clients – server) and decentralised (peer-to-peer) models available.

A democratic core system does not guarantee that Internet has a democratising effect on society. Most people do not have the faintest clue about how Internet works, and cannot program the computer to do what they want. So it is programmers’ responsibility that tools are available to the public. If we are serious about wanting the Internet to be a democratising force, programmers have to take this responsibility seriously.

Democracy means “Rule of the people”. The ideal is that decisions are taken by an informed public, not the wealthy elite. How can the Internet contribute? Well, there are two parts to consider here. Informing the public and enabling the public to decide.

Information distribution

Information distribution is the Internet’s forte. Once information is on a web server it can be accessed from anywhere within seconds. And once it is out there, it is difficult to remove. Even if a web site is taken down, someone else will mirror it. A great example is The Pirate Bay. In May 2006, Swedish police (on orders from United States) stormed the server room where the Pirate Bay was hosted, and confiscated all servers. But it took less than three days before The Pirate Bay was on-line again, on different servers in a different country.

What are the threats to Internet’s ability to inform the public? First of all there is good old censorship of the kind that take down sites or block people from viewing it. This is done in a fair number of countries today, notably China, Russia, Iran and Australia. But we can, and should, develop effective countermeasures to this.

The second and more severe threats is also quite conventional. It is the form of censorship Chomsky talks about in the above interview, namely media that are not run for the benefit of its audience. The Internet variation of this is websites which only serve to attract users, either to sell advertisement space, or collect information about the users and sell to advertisers.

In this category of websites we find the on-line versions of most of the mainstream press. Here it is important that we facilitate alternatives. And there are alternatives. A good example is DemocracyNow, an excellent independent, American news source. But such alternatives are threatened by ISPs giving (selling) priority to traffic routing to certain sites and services. In the future we can envision a crippled Internet where you can choose between predefined sets of web sites and services to use.

Enabling the public power

Power in today’s society is roughly split between private investors, politicians, public bureaucrats, corporate management. If the public is to gain some power to shape their surroundings, their best hope is to organise. And they do: Parents organise to change how schools are run. Workers organise to change how their workplace is run. And the civil rights movement has fought bravely, and changed many things the last sixty years.

The Internet can make it easier for people to organise. People with common interests can communicate across it, even when they are physically far apart. Meetings can be organised, quickly, and gather many people. Encryption enables people to communicate without employers and government eavesdropping. Hopefully this can take some of the risk off being a whistle-blower.

One movement, which has both contributed to and taken huge advantage of the Internet, is the Free Software Movement. Through the Internet thousands of software developers have organised to provide world with free software. To organise their efforts, they have created many tools which can be used by other groups. Today, people (at least the 22% with Internet access) can easily set up discussion forums, chat rooms, wikis, blogs, mailing lists and web pages.

There are popular movements working to have influence on the development of the Internet. An example is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has local branches in many countries. Many people are concerned about the issue of ISPs giving priority to certain types of traffic. To combat this the concept of Net Neutrality has been created. Which means that ISPs should treat all traffic as equal.

So what can you and I do help in this struggle? What sort of programs can we make to help people organise against oppression? What sort of activism can we employ to create net neutrality? How can we raise awareness about these issues in the public? I am open for any suggestions, and have some of my own.