- It’s becoming a common phenomenon around the world when the government authorities sensing unrest in their respective countries immediately initiate measures to ban the internet. Even as digitalization efforts have revolutionized the way information is accessed by people at the click or touch of smartphones, the authorities are becoming increasingly cagey about the consequences of unverified information adding fuel to the already burning matter at hand. The penetration of mobile phones and internet accessibility in every country is phenomenal, and India is one of the leading exponents by some stretch. With the advent of deepfakes making their ominous presence, the authorities are expected to remain on guard to avert disturbances.
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PC:Business Standard
- As such, any semblance of unrest in society instantly compels law enforcement agencies to clamp restrictions on the information flow. Thus, the banning of the internet has become one of the foremost measures to ensure peace is not disturbed further. Yes, there are instances when fake forwards have incited the mob to go on a rampage. Look at how our eastern neighbour China has erected an internet firewall making sure the information flow is filtered before reaching the commoners. Now, other governments are trying to copy China. But does it even work? As if worries like inflation, political dysfunction, and terror attacks weren’t challenging enough, Pakistanis this year have also been saddled with a slowed internet.
PC:Britannica
- Reports mention how they have struggled with files taking hours instead of minutes to upload. This is reportedly a side-effect of the government experimenting with China-style internet censorship. There, the Great Firewall started in 2000 has grown into a despotic surveillance that even diasporic Chinese can’t escape. It’s an idea many regimes find seductive. But lacking the ideological and administrative cohesion of the Communist Chinese Party, they end up looking more muddled than fearsome. And China itself is a cautionary tale in the costs of such censorship. Remember, in 2008, in trying to block specific material, Pakistan managed to cut YouTube from the global web. Creaking tech grid will not support fancy firewalling efforts, you see.
PC:CNBC
Russia’s attempts to emulate the Chinese firewall have similarly encountered repeated engineering challenges. By accident, major websites have been pushed offline for long periods. But other countries don’t just inhabit a different skills universe than China, its politics is alien too. In Pakistan, the use of crooked cyber tools by one government can mean the people’s will to form an alternative government is sabotaged. Of course, any censorship today is nuts by any definition hardly able to withstand the intended objective. Authorities keep chasing wordplay, memes, and in-jokes but the supply never runs out. Nor do people’s internet workarounds get banned material. Did someone say it’s a futile exercise? You bet; it is.
