Experts Concerned by Authoritarian Governments' Adaptation to Internet, But Still Hopeful
Rising nationalism and authoritarian governments' ability to adapt to social media are a threat to promotion of U.S. stakeholders' vision of the internet as a force for global democracy, but that doesn't mean the U.S. should temper its efforts to share that viewpoint, said experts Tuesday. New America Editorial Director-Future Tense Andrés Martinez said at a New America event that U.S.-based companies like Google and Netflix continue to hold “staggering” dominance over the internet sector. U.S. dominance of the internet sector was one of the factors that drove the now-completed effort to spin off oversight of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority from NTIA (see 1403170069 and 1610030042).
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Authoritarian governments' growing adoption of internet tools like social media to meet their political goals shows reality hasn't met stakeholders' early expectations that the internet would help democratize the world, said New America Director-Ranking Digital Rights Rebecca MacKinnon and others. “There was a lot of euphoria early on about the democratizing power of the internet” in which many stakeholders' expectations “got a little out of whack,” said Future Tense Fellow Emily Parker. Anyone who thought the internet was going to unseat the Chinese government was making a “problematic assumption,” she said. “We should be wary of also now saying the internet is an authoritarian tool.” U.S. companies faced a “reality check” on their power as they worked to break into the Chinese market, as that country has been “changing them” via the export of compromise versions of their platforms, Parker said.
Senior Manager-Communications Nu Wexler said Twitter initially was seen as the “voice of dissidents,” particularly during the 2011 Arab Spring. That view shifted as governments increasingly used Twitter to communicate, though the company doesn't cooperate with governments that request information on users “just because someone is criticizing the government,” Wexler said. Twitter generally takes a “hands-off approach” to content posted via the platform, seeing itself as “facilitating conversations” rather than backing either the positions of governments or dissidents, he said.
Efforts by China and other governments to enact laws aimed at localizing data also are problematic for U.S. companies, said Microsoft Director-Technology Policy Carolyn Nguyen. There's a tension between the need to respect national sovereignty and the “borderless” goals of cloud technologies, she said. Though data localization threatens to balkanize the internet, India and other governments that in the past were hostile to multistakeholder internet governance have more recently supported multistakeholderism, Nguyen said.