Janet Haven: Boiling the frog in Iranian cyberspace

Reuters noted yesterday that internet connectivity at homes and internet cafes in Iran has been limited to 128 kbps (workable but slow for the children of broadband). The squeeze does not affect business in Iran, only private ISP customers. On 128 kbps you can read a text-mostly blog quite easily, check your email, surf the net, etc. It's more frustrating to do anything that involves big chunks of data -- use video or image-heavy sites, watch the Daily Show, listen to a podcast. It also makes it harder to use Web 2.0 services, like flickr, gmail calendar, Google Earth, or iTunes (or AllMyMP3, for that matter). According to the Reuters story, the Iranian government gave no explanation for the shift in policy, and notes that "Iranian surfers will now find it much slower to download music or anything else from the Web."

True, they will. But perhaps even more importantly to the Iranian government, Iranian surfers will find it much slower to upload to the web -- getting a video onto YouTube, a podcast onto a blog, or dozens of pictures from an anti-government demonstration will be slow and frustrating, although not impossible. If Reuters report is correct, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that Iran is trying to limit media freedom, both in terms of access and creation. The tactic, the classic boiled frog of civil libertarian nightmares, is smart -- reduce but don't cut off access. Annoy people, but don't send them into the streets protesting. Of course, if they do end up in the streets, there will be less documentation out there in the form of video, audio, and imagery, thanks to a choked internet connection.

The situation Reuters outlines in Iran perfectly illustrates the arguments Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith make in "Who Controls the Internet: Illusions of a Borderless World", a book I recently read. As those who work in or around countries with repressive governments know, the early promise of the internet as a space of free expression beyond government control has turned out to be sadly incorrect, betrayed by the terrestrial nature of internet connectivity. Wu and Goldsmith talk in the book about the legal and illegal methods of coersion a government can use to control what happens online within geographical borders. The easiest, in a country like Iran, is to coerce the ISPs to simply do what the government wants. In countries where the government is already broadly feared, ISPs don't necessarily need a legal directive to limit their clients' access to online information. China's ISPs (in)famously employ legions of censors to avoid attracting government attention through their client-genearted content. It appears that the same mentality exists in Iran :

...another ISP official said he expected the restriction to stay in place.
He said his firm had yet to be officially informed of the new order but was starting to impose the limitations on customers anyway "because we are not looking for problems".

Comments

nice post Janet.

I think you meant 128kbit not mbit though.

sometimes people underestimate the value of bandwidth and the value of convenience, the number of videos documenting police brutality in Egypt being released on the internet increased exponentially once youtube got popular. easy dialup access from anywhere plus cheaper and cheaper broadband where the major catalyst of not only the web side of activism in Egypt but the formation of the very movements and activists that operate offline.

but let's not forget that access in Iran was always annoying, expensive and slow, we've seen the rise of hundreds of thousands of blogs under flaky dialup.

Posted by: alaa | October 20, 2006 04:44 AM

Hi Alaa,

Yes, exactly, kb. 128 mbps would be, well, fab. But you're absolutely right about the rise of blogs with flaky dial-up -- the largely-text quality of blogging is a very good thing in low-connectivity environments. What's really slowed down, though, is the multimedia aspects that are becoming so important, and so powerful.

Thanks for stopping by!

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