We’ve been talking up the need to look beyond Korea as THE model to emulate because their vaunted successes have been achieved with massive long-term subsidies that are difficult for most countries to replicate. But here are some other less known features of the Korean Internet environment that one would not want to emulate: Every week portions of the Korean web are taken down by government censors. Last year about 23,000 Korean webpages were deleted, and another 63,000 blocked, at the request of the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), a nominally independent (but mainly government-appointed) public body. In 2009 the KCSC had made just 4,500 requests for deletion. Its filtering chiefly targets pornography, prostitution and gambling, all of which are illegal in South Korea.
The title of an article in The Diplomat is “Has Snowden killed Internet freedom?” Whatever one thinks of Mr. Snowden’s actions or motives, one of his most lasting legacies in ousting these programs is likely to be severely setting back the cause of Internet freedom in the international community. Although the U.S.
The irony was palpable. At the recent talk I gave on telecom sector reforms at the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute, I used Khan Academy to illustrate what Digital Bangladesh would give the people of Bangladesh. Everybody was very happy, since Salman Khan has Bangladeshi roots. But I knew, and they knew, that the government bans YouTube at the drop of a hat and at that moment, it was blocked for all users of BTCL connectivity. So no Khan Academy.
“The mobile phone can be an instrument of liberation even against heavy odds, and this is a subject on which the authorities are, understandably, scared. Communication is snapped in order to keep the population in a state of voice-less and communication-less submission” Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen makes the above statement about a liberating potential of mobiles. Here is the counterpoint: Social networks offer a cheaper and easier way to identify dissidents than other, more traditional forms of surveillance. Despite talk of a “dictator’s dilemma”, censorship technology is sophisticated enough to block politically sensitive material without impeding economic activity, as China’s example shows. The internet can be used to spread propaganda very effectively, which is why Hugo Chávez is on Twitter.