Interview: 'Authoritarian Governments Have Immensely Benefited From The Web,'

[Esperluette]

Evgeny Morozov, a noted specialist on the use of new communications technologies to promote democratic values, has a new book titled "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side Of Internet Freedom." In it, he argues that hype about "Twitter revolutions" and the enormous potential of the Internet to promote open societies and roll back authoritarianism is naive and overblown.

What's more, Morozov warns, authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, and Iran have adapted quickly to devise new ways -- often modeled on commercial Internet-monitoring tools used by Western corporations -- to track and neutralize Internet activism.

RFE/RL correspondent Robert Coalson spoke with Morozov by telephone from London and asked him about the potential and the dangers that new information technologies present for democracy-promotion efforts around the world.

Morozov is a blogger, contributing editor to "Foreign Policy" and "Boston Review," and fellow at the New America Foundation.

Looking Closer At Democracy Promotion

RFE/RL: I left your book, to be honest, uncertain about where you stand on whether or not democracy promotion is a possible or worthwhile goal in general, one that Western governments and NGOs should be pursuing in regard to authoritarian regimes?

Morozov: I don't think, actually, it is that ambiguous in the book. I do several times mention that what I want is just to find a better way to use the Internet for promoting democracy, so to me that sounds like a very explicit endorsement of promoting democracy to begin with.

To answer even more directly, yes, I do think there are definitely things that foundations and governments can do to promote, if not the banner of democracy, then at least the banner of democratic values, freedom of expression, and human rights. So in no way do I want to reject or stop that work from happening.

RFE/RL: Perhaps what gave me that impression was that you so thoroughly discredit the cyberutopianism that has been so prevalent in recent years without offering anything else.

Morozov: Well, you can also be rejecting the approaches the neoconservatives take to the promotion of the "freedom agenda" and still believe that we need to promote democracy and human rights. And the fact that I reject one particular approach to promoting Internet freedom doesn't in itself mean that I reject the parts that make up the Internet freedom agenda.

I mean, the problem with the Internet freedom agenda is that when you add up all its components, they end up much more harmful as a whole than they are when you look at them as just parts. So, by the way, that was also the problem with the freedom agenda, where, yes, there were some very good ideas and, yes, some of them were very benign and some of them were not, but when you mix it all up with military intervention and disrespect for the international community and many other things, you end up with a situation which is much worse.

And it is my fear that this may also happen with the Internet freedom agenda, where already you see that a lot of people feel that the U.S. government is hypocritical and duplicitous, simply because its response to WikiLeaks just contradicts so much what they have been saying internationally. So, again, it may potentially hurt the ability to do things in the future.

But, to answer your question, no, I do think that we should be engaged in promoting democracy. The means by which we've been doing it are up for debate, but when it comes to the Internet, my main concern is about the kind of procedural arrangements within institutions and, especially, within institutions like the [u.S.] State Department.

And it is a matter of who gets to set this policy -- whether it is people who are technology experts and know quite a bit about Silicon Valley, but may not necessarily be knowledgeable about the foreign-policy context, or whether it's people who are knowledgeable about the broader foreign-policy context, but may not be knowledgeable about the Internet.

To me, it is a really pragmatic question of whom do you empower and whether you actually want to sum up and aggregate all of these different kinds of ways to use the Internet in all the countries where American or European interests are present under the banner of something called "Internet freedom" or an "Internet freedom agenda." There is -- as I hope I identify in the book -- there is a danger to using terms like this because people in those countries and other governments do not always necessarily understand what exactly that means -- whether it means promoting freedom of the Internet or promoting freedom via the Internet. And that in itself, this uncertainty itself, often generates counterreactions to what the U.S. wants to do, which results in greater Internet unfreedom, if you wish.

So, to me the original question that the Internet should be used for democracy promotion and that there should be democracy promotion to begin with -- it is just that the exact way to do it, I think, needs to be rethought.

Le WoT à lire ici : http://www.rferl.org/content/interview_mor…on/2284105.html