Repressive Regimes Fighting Losing Battle Against Internet Freedom, McDowell Says

In Indonesia in 1998, President Suharto was ousted by a student movement that succeeded only because students were able to organize using cellphones, McDowell said at the Stockholm conference. Six years later, during the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine “Kiev’s college students used their mobile phones to organize their protests, dubbed ’smart mobbing,’ in Independence Square,” he said. More recently, in Libya, “some of Moammar Gadhafi’s former aides allegedly have advised him to submit his resignation through Twitter,” McDowell said.

"Thankfully, the number of success stories such as these keeps growing despite some countries’ attempts to increase their control over the inner workings of the Internet,” McDowell said. He said over time repressive regimes will find they won’t be able to clamp down on the Internet. “Regimes that have locked their societies closed are desperately trying to buy more time for themselves by cracking down on grassroots uprisings made easier by these new technological keys,” he said. “Libya, Syria and Iran come to mind. But their leaders should look at Egypt and Tunisia if they want to understand their fate."

Chinese President Hu Jintao and possible successor Zhou Yongkang should draw the same lesson as they undertake a program of “social management” through tighter restrictions on the Internet, McDowell said. “In a country that prefers to take the long view, … the long-term prospects for such power grabs are doomed,” he said. “China is blessed with an energetic and technically trained workforce containing nearly a half billion Internet users who can -- and will -- work around the government’s technical clampdowns in the pursuit of freedom.”

But McDowell also warned that net neutrality rules approved by the FCC last December could have a corrosive effect, giving some bad actors internationally cover to impose regulations. “State interference with the ‘Net … has been undermining liberty, not private sector mischief,” he said. McDowell elaborated on that in a telephone interview prior to Monday’s speech. “For years through the Clinton administration it was the policy of the U.S. that there should be a minimal amount of regulation of the inner workings of the Internet and certainly no international body to regulate the Internet,” he told us. “Now it’s moved beyond that to where should the line be drawn for regulations.” That discussion has “been fueled in part” by the net neutrality rules, he said.

McDowell told us “the Genie may be out of the bottle” as far as regulators elsewhere citing the U.S. as they clamp down on the Internet. “But the U.S. could clarify its opposition to such regulation if it were to repeal the net neutrality order or, I guess, freedom on the net could be helped … if a court overturns that order.”

The problem, is that some bad actors internationally don’t have the same “benevolent intentions” net neutrality supporters did in urging the FCC to adopt rules last year, McDowell said. “I think we've already handed them the political cover they needed to justify more government intrusion into these matters,” he said. “An appellate decision isn’t going to deter some authoritarian regime trying to interfere with Internet traffic.”