Cuba
This small, sad little island nation maintains a separate national network, on which one may access an e-mail program, government news sites and a highly sanitized online encyclopedia. It is possible to get on the true Internet there, but it requires special government permission to access and time on it is prohibitively expensive. If you somehow get permission to access the World Wide Web, it costs seven dollars an hour (the average take home salary in Cuba is 20 dollars a month) and the speeds are pitifully slow. The national intranet only costs $1.50 an hour.
Myanmar
Recently an American hacker exposed that the Myanmar government only allows 118 of the country’s 12,284 IP addresses total access to the internet. The rest of the users are on a tightly-controlled Intranet, which bans all criticism of the government. They have imprisoned a number of bloggers who have dared to question the competency of the government or hold dialogs with foreign media.
Of course no discussion of Internet censorship would be complete without a trip to the Great Firewall of China, a tool of oppression so amazing that the egos of the government slugs that built it can be seen from outer space. Out of the impressive list of countries that make great efforts to control the flow of Internet information across their borders, China is the only one with any economic power. This has nothing to do with their careful control of the World Wide Web, however. If Cuba or Uzbekistan had access to the manpower of roughly one billion slaves and a hundred million middle management types, they too could be building ghost cities in the middle of nowhere and giving everyone cancer.
The one thing that all these Internet-hating, information-fearing despotic countries have in common is that they are, at best, copycats. The do not innovate, dreaming up the next great advancement in human society. The frightened leaders of these nations just desperately clutch at the modicum of power they have, terrified that, if their people actually learn that there is a better way to live, bloody riots will break out in the streets. These nations will need to change the way they think about information, or suffer the same fate as the once titanic Soviet Union, which was ultimately not defeated with bullets and bombs, but with the rise of telecommunications and their utter inability to compete with a freer, wiser and more innovative world at large.
