As Web 2.0 Grows, Some Freedoms Erode

Today, a headline on BBC News read, “China leader urges net crackdown.” The story’s summary reads something to the effect that Chinese President Hu Jintao is now requiring that the Internet accessible by millions of now regularly connected countrymen and women be purged of “unhealthy” content. Of course, this comes after a myriad of dailies and weeklies in various parts of the world (not the least of which the United States) had spent a good deal of time, paper and bandwidth pondering the newfound openness of the governing party when faced with internal statistics that show rapid growth of Internet use on the mainland.

So what is it? Are they seeing the light, or aren’t they? Will there be more freedoms granted, or not? If your gut leans toward the latter options, you’re probably far more in the right than the people who guestimate the opposite.

It seems as if the Chinese government - at least after Hu Jintao’s insistence that China’s naughty Web bandits shape up and get their act in line - is in a rut. Playing both sides of the aisle, perhaps. Sounds a bit like some policy makers (or policy breakers, if you will) over here in the Western world, eh?

If only the call for stringency was a China-only initiative. (That isn’t said to castigate the Chinese, only to lead into the point I’m about to make.) Governments all over the world are cracking down on wandering eyes confronted with the entire breadth of the Net. From the Middle East to the African continent to, yes, China, authorities are taking it upon themselves to silence bloggers and others who don’t speak well of their countries’ leaders, elected or not, or their policies, or anything else, really.

Stories of dissidents leaving their homelands and prison sentences being passed onto unruly keyboardists are now a regular topic of discussion, and have risen so frequently that the media rights group Reporters Without Borders have taken it upon themselves to publish an already-much-talked-about volume titled The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents.

(We’re not sure whether the title is replaced by one which appears a tad more friendly to the prying eyes working for the not-so-laissez-faire regimes.)

David Reid, a reporter for BBC Click, has expounded on the subject of rights now available and unavailable to people in lands shrouded in controversy at the same time that attempts are being made by nations to remain relevant and technologically erudite in the eyes of the world at large.