These oppressive governments do not seem to understand the concept of proxies, do they?

Every computer connected to the internet can effectively act as a proxy. Even if you blocked all the proxies in the world, somebody could just ask a friend living outside the country to reroute the traffic through the friend’s PC (it would not take much work to set up).

Then you would have to have ISPs check every packet that goes via their exits – good luck doing that in the face of encryption.

There are three things about the internet that are inevitably going to be standard throughout the world: the “piss in the swimming pool” principle, encryption and anonymity. Countries like China are going to learn this eventually. The Great Firewall can only temporarily prolong the inevitable.

The only real way for the government to “manage” the internet is to crush it completely. That is why you see Libya and Syria panic by shutting off their ISPs in tense moments. North Korea took the smart move of never connecting to the internet – they instinctively knew that mass inter-connectivity was a bad thing for them right from the start.

And do you know what North Korea’s internet piracy rate is? 0%. China’s rate is 80%. Therefore we know that a) no internet whatsoever is how you get your low level of piracy and b) there is a rough correlation between government control of the internet and high piracy rates as well as low rates which is contradictory yet somewhat explainable… and in China’s case that is amplified by its free trade restrictions that cut off people buying media legitimately (just like as we all know it is invariably a bad thing to limit YouTube content by country – the piracy skyrockets).

However, it must be remembered that cyber utopians do not learn from history. Otherwise they would not be utopians. The internet is not going to solve all of humanity’s problems. Governments still have clever ways of being able to use the internet to its advantages such as crowd-sourcing the identities of dissidents using their own fascist supporters amongst the population. China for example can give the illusion to most of its citizens that it is not oppressive by allowing some criticism of its policies to go ahead if it is safe for them (this is the difference between total control and effective control), therefore taming and calming any revolutionary backlash.

Equally, it is possible for the Chinese government to set up traps by making supposedly anti-government websites of their own, encouraging revolution, organising when and where opposition meetings are going to take place, then having the secret police bust them all unexpectedly (we all know O’Brien and the Inner Party had set up the Brotherhood themselves in 1984 as bait for dissidents – O’Brien just rubbed it in even more by not admitting it and encouraging us to come to our own conclusions).

Also, the internet can encourage a sense of “armchair liberalism” where steam is let off on blogs but nothing is actually done in the real world. Oppressive governments may indeed have nothing to fear from angry bloggers if they still have the monopoly of guns and violence.

We also cannot forget that it would be a slow and painful death for an Iraqi family if they were caught with a satellite dish under Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian and genocidal rule. It just goes to show that there are situations where technological advances cannot stop fascism. We cannot ignore this.

This RSA Animate video is also a very good indicator of the sort of thing I mean:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk8x3V-sUgU

In short, the internet will only be as good as the politics of the people who use it. It (sometimes) does not matter how much internet access you give to people… if you cannot give them morality and rationality, we are still going to be a stupid and overrated species.

Copyright law, for instance, is positively harmful as it gives lobbyists a dangerous degree of power to pressure democratic governments into giving up liberty for security… which as we all know gives you neither. This has to be resisted, otherwise we will have to learn the hard way. SOPA, always remember, would have given corporations the ability to crush any website on a whim without a trial. The fact that it has got to this stage is terrifying. This is what a culture that is too faithful in copyright can do. It must be abolished in order to show that artists can prosper without it and to make it very unlucky for society to go back to the way things were. Crowdfunding websites are the real revolutionaries here.