Cuba and Burma grapple with the Internet threat

Dictators might hate the Internet and everything that it stands for, but most of them have already quietly made peace with it, if only for reasons of economic development: they bet that the Web could improve their economies faster than it could erode their grip on power. Dictators may still tinker with the Internet – some choose to filter, some choose to censor, and some – to deploy cheap online propaganda – but ultimately, they have accepted that it’s here to stay. As the cases of Russia and China illustrate, controlled and even quasi-controlled environment could easily co-exist with societies that are growing more prosperous without necessarily becoming any more democratic.

Burma and Cuba have been one of the slowest authoritarian states to start experimenting with the Internet, having deliberately delayed its spread through their territories. While  Russians and the Chinese didn’t bother with installing artificial barriers to access, focusing their efforts on controlling rather than preventing the conversations, the Cubans and the Burmese made it very hard even to get online, not to mention start creating content. From the perspective of Internet control, this, of course, is a far more superior solution than filtering: you can’t go wrong with filtering something that doesn’t exist.

However, I think both the Cuban and the Burmese regimes have made the fundamental mistake of underestimating the Internet’s ability to serve as, firstly, the new opium for the masses, which could take some pressure off the government’s own propaganda apparatus, and, secondly, as a motor of economic growth, which could help their otherwise sagging economies grow faster. Judging by the recent news coming out of both countries, it appears that the Cuban authorities have learned their lessons, while the Burmese haven’t.

Earlier this week a decree posted on the Web site of the Cuban government’s official gazette announced that post offices throughout the country would be allowed to offer Internet services to all "naturalized citizens". This will allow ordinary Cubans to finally see what the Internet beyond the government-own local network – the Intranet – looks like.

Access to the Internet in Cuba still remains prohibitively slow and expensive, while many popular services do not function as they should: just this week, after announcing the good news about the post offices, the government banned the use of VoIP services like Skype for foreign calls. Cuba’s Internet is, of course, very different from what the one that users in North American and Western Europe have come to love and hate, but recent developments show that the Cubans are comfortable with emulating the Chinese model. Controlled Internet is better than no Internet at all.

The Burmese authorities, on the other hand, are walking further and further away from that model. The Burmese junta were initially big fans of the Internet and technology; a few years ago they even seeded Burma’s own Silicon Valley – known as Yadanabon Cyber City – 10,000-acre ICT park near Mandalay, divided into "incubator units" and "software zones" – the terms we do not normally associate with Burma. The government created strong incentives for private tech investors and a dozen companies agreed to invest a total of $12 million into the project

However, even before Cyber City opened its doors, something went awry and the Burmese authorities started having thoughts about the usefulness of the Internet, at least for their domestic consumption. The origins of their paranoia are easy to trace: numerous graphic photos and videos of the infamous 2007 monk uprising were distributed via the Internet (a knowledgeable Burmese Web master once told me that while the Burmese authorities banned the download of any files from the Web, they forgot to turn off the "upload" – this explained why so much information managed to get out, even though the government had the opportunity to completely turn it off).

Today Irrawady, the popular Burmese magazine in exile, reports that that the government has prohibited its own civil servants from using the Web for fears they may leak information to exile media outlets like Irrawady. Government workers who need Internet would now need to apply for special permission; any use of non-government email has also been banned (however, it’s quite likely that junta’s top officials will keep using their Gmail: this is only a step to be able to better monitor what is going on in the inboxes of junior bureaucrats). Irrawady reports that the crackdown on government use of the Internet has already slowed down the speed and efficiency of communications in the country.

The real reason for this, however, may be more banal: the junta simply doesn’t want the government workers to read exile media and thus be informed about the true state of affairs in the country. As the high cost of Internet access makes it impossible for most Burmese to have it at home, reading news from work is the only solution. Now, even that work-around has been eliminated.

Tracing how both countries adjust their strategies of Internet control, juggling between the threats that the Web poses and the gains that it brings could help us better understand the vulnerabilities of their respective regimes. The Burmese case is easy to read: the situation must be so bad that even the government’s own bureaucrats no longer buy the excuses. Cuba presents a more sophisticated story, for it is not clear whether the government has fundamentally rethought the value of the Internet to its own purposes or whether the recent efforts are part of a broader, all-encompassing liberalization campaign sweeping the country.