The picture that accompanies the following New York Times article shows three Malaysian female delegates, replete with head scarves, looking at a computer screen. I don’t know if there was editorial intent behind the picture but my immediate reaction was that I couldn’t imagine these three (and many other non-US delegates) being concerned with the protection of unresticted political, cultural, and sexual expression on the Internet. One only has to look no further than the Nicholas Kristof column on Chinese Chatroom Censorship that I posted last week (re-posted below) to see the way some other governments “control the Internet”. This would not be accepted here and should not be).
From the New York Times—
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/15/te.../15divide.html
U.N. Agrees to Examine How Internet Is Governed
By JENNIFER L. SCHENKER
GENEVA, Dec. 13 - For the United States and some other industrial nations, the most significant development at the United Nations conference on the Internet may have been what did not happen.
In the four-day conference, which ended Friday, the industrialized powers had feared that developing nations would vote for the United Nations to take administrative control of the Internet and call for a new pool of money to help poorer countries go online - money that industrial nations presumably would be expected to provide.
Instead, the delegates agreed that a United Nations working group should be set up to examine whether to introduce more international oversight of the Internet’s semiformal administrative bodies. Those bodies include Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a company under contract to the United States Commerce Department that coordinates Internet addresses and some other technical issues.
Another United Nations committee will be set up to review ways of paying for efforts to connect the world’s poor to the Internet.
Industrialized countries pushed for and won an endorsement of intellectual property rights as well as human rights and media freedom.
The leader of the United States’ delegation, David Gross, said the conference outcome meant that private sector interests would not lose their stake in how the Internet is governed, although they would have to make more room at the table for other stakeholders. “We are still listening, very carefully, about how that might be done,” Mr. Gross said.
The United States nonetheless took its lumps at the conference.
“Even if it is not true, there is a perception that the U.S. government is running the Internet,” said Eli M. Noam, who is the head of the Institute for Tele-Information at Columbia University and was a session moderator at the conference.
Many public comments were similar to those expressed by Shashi Tharoor, the United Nations under secretary general for information and communications, who said in an interview, “Unlike the French Revolution, the Internet revolution has lots of liberty, some fraternity and no equality.”
According to the International Telecommunications Union, the United Nations agency that organized the conference, only 1 percent of people in the world’s poorest countries are connected to the Internet. To illustrate the gap between rich and poor countries, the agency noted that the 450,000 residents of Luxembourg have more Internet capacity than Africa’s 760 million people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/13/opinion/13KRIS.html
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Coffee, Tea or Freedom?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BEIJING
Impressed by the boom in Internet chat rooms in China, I conducted an experiment this week to test the limits of free speech.
On several of these chat rooms I tried to post a message, in Chinese and seemingly from an ordinary Chinese, declaring, “Why is Prime Minister Wen Jiabao off in America kowtowing to the imperialists when he should be solving more important problems at home!”
That was censored. I tried again, posting a more subdued version and, again, it was censored. So my third version was milder yet: “Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s visit to America has been very successful, but I wonder if perhaps he is wasting too much time abroad instead of focusing on our own important problems like unemployment.”
That turned out to be what Chinese journalists call a cabianqiu, after the term for a Ping-Pong ball that just nicks the corner of the table: legal by a whisker. The censors didn’t intervene, and I successfully posted that comment in three chat rooms.
So that’s the frontier of free speech in China in the information age, and it reflects real progress. Sure, the thought police toss Internet dissidents in prison, with 66 Chinese journalists and Web scribblers currently behind bars, some facing torture and beatings. Still, this is pretty much the first time since the 1980’s that the Chinese have had public forums in which they can (very delicately) criticize top national leaders by name.
China’s new emperor, President Hu Jintao, is presiding over this twilight zone and trying hard rather successfully to convince the population that he’s a new kind of leader. Most Chinese I talk to are very impressed by Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen, who project a humility and compassion very different from the pomposity of the former emperor, Jiang Zemin. My guess is that Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen would win a free election if it was offered.
Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen are relentlessly photographed feeling the pain of the poor and the underdog. Most important, they have begun to address AIDS in a serious way.
Yet as I travel around China and talk to everyone from peasants to senior officials, I’m afraid the leaders’ strategy will fail and ultimately lead to upheavals in the coming years. The reason is that China has always operated to some degree on fear, and that fear is now eroding. Chinese don’t protest when they are most upset, but when they think they can get away with it: that has been true of every upheaval from the 1956 Hundred Flowers outpouring of complaints all the way to the Tiananmen Square democracy movement of 1989.
Ever since the Tiananmen movement was brutally crushed, China has been fairly stable because its leaders and its citizens have each been a bit afraid of the other. But the fear has steadily ebbed, and my guess is that henceforth fewer overtaxed peasants or laid-off workers will suffer in silence.
“This Mr. Nice Guy approach won’t work,” a senior government official warned. “You can’t govern by pretending to be nice to everybody. You’ve got to make hard choices. You’ve got to maintain control.”
China is not Communist any more. It increasingly resembles the kind of complex (and corrupt) society that led to turbulence in South Korea and Taiwan in the 1970’s and 1980’s. One window into the country’s changing values came this fall when President Hu’s daughter, Hu Haiqing, married one of the country’s leading Internet capitalists, Mao Daolin, in Hawaii.
The government is simply losing control of China, which now has 78 million Internet surfers and 250 million mobile phones. It’s true that the middle class now has a stake in the system and may be wary of Tiananmen-style mass movements, but there are also deep grievances, especially among peasants and laborers.
The decline of fear is welcome, of course, but it’s also going to mean a bumpy road ahead. In a city in Manchuria, I stopped in a small restaurant and ordered a cup of coffee. The waiter asked whether I wanted Nescaf, Maxim coffee, Swiss coffee, Brazilian coffee, Blue Mountain coffee, mountain-grown coffee, mocha coffee, iced coffee or Italian cappuccino. I can’t help feeling that when people get multiple choices in ordering a cup of coffee, it’s only a matter of time before they demand choices in national politics.
So I think that the long calm that followed Tiananmen is ending. Exciting times are coming to China again.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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