So, there's a lot happening right now. Looks like I'm going to have to blog in overdrive, which probably means these posts wont be great, so apologies in advance. First order of business: Egypt. Unless you live in a bubble, or perhaps The Bubble (totally should have gotten a second series) then you will know of the problems in Egypt. Here I'm going to say that the politics of the situation is irrelevant to my blog post, so not even going to go there. Right now on the situation of interest: the Internet!
So, amidst protests and unrest and in general everything not being so hunky dory, the Egyptian government flipped the switch on the Internet. The whole country was sans Internet. There was massive outrage both inside and outside Egypt. And here's my issue with that: Deal with it!
People everywhere have become to accustomed to the Internet being there and available. Everybody is so hooked into the Internet that they just assume it will always be there, that it is a right they have. Access to the Internet is a privilege, the most abused privilege in the world. At some level I guess I sort of believe it to be a right as well, but I am aware that it could be taken away at any point.
So, now a bit of background from recent history: The Iranian "Twitter revolution." The basic gist is that all protests and opposition and so on where coordinated via Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. Although the Iranian government was able to take down classical telecommunications, the Internet provided a channel for communication. It seems the Egyptian government took this lesson to heart and flipped that switch as well.
The problem with allowing people to broadcast their agenda and/or grievances over Facebook and Twitter is that it tends to skew public opinion one way or the other, generally not in favour of the Government. It seems that anti-government sentiments are more quickly adopted than pro-government sentiments, at least to my observation. This seems to be irrelevant of how valid the grievances are. So in a bid to avoid this, the Egyptian government shut off the Internet.
However, the Internet is a resilient little bastard. There were some very novel ways conjured up to access the Internet. There were several other ways which were fun and creative, but they carried on accessing the Internet and rallying support for their cause. This further compounded the outrage against the "oppressive regime."
Note the quotation marks, as I would like to disagree. The circumstances of the event were not exactly normal. There was some civil unrest, there were protests and there was a curfew in place. The government acted in a way which they believed would not cause the opinions of the rest of the world to be slanted to far against them and they failed.
There have been other countries that have considered having an Internet "kill-switch" (I am oddly undecided if I love or hate that), most notably USA. I think one of my favourite things to come out of this is this post, where an anonymous poster says Australia has a backbone for stating they will not have an IKS (just wanted to try out that acronym, don't think it will stick.) I would strongly disagree and say it's the opposite.
As I have stated before, here and here, the Internet has too little regulation and something like this would bring in some level of regulation. It is not all that's needed and is not necessarily the best way to do it, but it's a start. I would not like it if my Internet was shut off by the government, but I would understand. What we need to understand is that the government has allowed you to access the Internet and they can take that away. They could just as easily ban cars or motorbikes or potatoes, which would probably be meet with the same response. Like I said, somewhere down the line the government said "Yes, we should allow the Internet" and then they gave licenses to ISPs and so on and so forth and you were connected. They can revoke that at any point in time, if they chose to.
Looking at this without the political dimension just points out another case where technology has grown too fast for legislators to keep up, through no fault of their own. Even experts are constantly learning new things and having to keep up. At some point, I hope, there will be some catching up done and we will all be better off for it. Until then, well, things will go on as before.
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Have to disagree here; access to the Internet is a human right. It's one of our main tools of communication and expression as a species. It's been almost a decade since the UN came to the same conclusion, along with some countries like Finland declaring access to the Internet a right in their law. What makes you think you know better? *plays devils advocate*
ReplyDeleteFor arguments sake, let's say that access to the Internet is a right. Even in this case, we have to note that there were several other basic right suspended, which would make this just another civil liberty retracted by the government in a time of civil unrest.
ReplyDeleteAlthough as you rightly said, it is a right in Finland, it isn't in most of the world. Until there is a legislation which states that, it is still not a right and as such can be taken away at the discretion of the government.
The right to communication is one thing, and the right to access the Internet is another. You do have the right to communicate, but you do not necessarily have the right to access all forms of communication.
This is a topic with quite a few grey areas, and I am glad you brought up your point of view.