Cheaper mobile phones with access to the web are certainly a part of that demand growth in developing nations, while in more traditional technology markets, hotspots, larger applications and cloud computing are to blame. Whatever the reason for demand, carriers are responding accordingly, with new submarine cables connecting more countries than ever before.

Telegeography tracks bandwidth supply, pricing and data on submarine cables, and the latest data shows how carriers that range from traditional players like Level 3 and Tata to newer investors such as Google are connecting all areas of the world. The firm estimates all regions are getting about 10 to 12 new terabits per second of capacity in the last five years. All in all in the last five years the world has gained 54 Tbps of new capacity.

This is great, because additional cables means more redundancy, so when accidents happen or cables get cut — as happened late last month off the coast of Egypt – traffic can route around the nicks in the system. That redundancy also allows new players into the market and can result in lower bandwidth costs, which is good for businesses buying bandwidth and indirectly for consumers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• From car to cloud: the future of the in-vehicle app landscape
• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook

According to the Associated Press, on Wednesday the Egyptian Navy detained three scuba divers in a dinghy near Alexandria, who were “cutting the undersea cable” of local telco Telecom Egypt. This was confirmed on the Navy’s Facebook page. Egyptian news agency MENA identified the affected cable as SMW4: the same one whose cutting caused an internet slowdown in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

MENA quoted officials saying services would be “back 100 percent on Thursday morning” via the use of “alternative feeds”. Telecom Egypt will apparently bear the cost of the repairs, both of this disruption and a separate cable cut last Friday.

Incidentally, the SMW4 cable (more properly known as South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 or SEA-ME-WE 4) was also involved in a very serious outage five years ago, which cut the capacity of the main Europe-Middle East connection by 75 percent. This one appears to have been less drastic.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Netflix may suffer from limited mobility

The Renesys blog entry is short, and promises updates. From the Renesys blog:

Starting at 10:26 UTC (12:26pm in Damascus), Syria’s international Internet connectivity shut down. In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria’s IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet.

Cutting off entire countries form the global Internet has become a strategy employed by some governments in times of civil unrest — and underscores many of the weak points of the Internet itself. Both Libya, Iran and Egypt pulled much of their connections to the web world offline in the last two years. We explained how Egypt took the country offline in this post:

The OpenNet Initiative has outlined two methods by which most nations could enact such shutdowns. Essentially, officials can either close down the routers which direct traffic over the border — hermetically sealing the country from outsiders — or go further down the chain and switch off routers at individual ISPs to prevent access for most users inside.

At the time Egypt took the second route to take the country offline, a process made easier by the fact that their were few ISPs to contact. It’s unclear how Syria disconnected its citizens. Some news reports say insurgents are communicating still via satellite phones, but the lost of IP addresses means no IP services can find their way to end users within the country. When a packet destined for a Syrian IP address is sent, it simply can’t find out where it’s supposed to go.

Update: Here’s what that drop off in traffic looks like, courtesy of Akamai.

This is one reason that technologies such as OpenBTS, Commotion, the Serval Project and other technologies to build out open source communications networks are important. While those may not ensure that people in Syria can talk to the outside world unless they have a satellite backhaul, they could still communicate with one another independently of the local ISPs.

Photo courtesy of <a href=”2lights.net / Shutterstock.com“>Shutterstock user 2lights.net.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

The clip that is being blocked is a 14-minute section of a longer film called “The Innocence of Muslims,” which reportedly shows a fictional attack by Muslims on a Christian family, followed by an account of the origins of the Islamic religion that portrays the prophet Muhammad as a fraud and a womanizer. Other fictional and/or humorous accounts of the prophet’s life have also caused violence in the past, including a fatwa or death sentence issued against author Salman Rushdie in 1989 for his book “The Satanic Verses,” and a series of attacks and deaths linked to offensive cartoons about the prophet that ran in a Danish newspaper in 2005.

It’s not clear the video is connected to the attack

In this case, the video clip has been connected to the death of U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens, who was killed on Tuesday in an attack on the embassy in Libya, along with three other members of the ambassador’s diplomatic staff. And in a statement released to the news media, Google made it clear that this is the main reason it decided to block access to the video from viewers in Egypt and Libya (attacks also occurred in Cairo that were linked to the clip). Said the company:

“This video — which is widely available on the Web — is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube. However, given the very difficult situation in Libya and Egypt, we have temporarily restricted access in both countries. Our hearts are with the families of the people murdered in yesterday’s attack in Libya.”

However, while many of the reports from mainstream media sources about the deaths in Libya have linked it to the video, CNN has said that the embassy attack was actually planned well in advance by members of an extremist group connected to al-Qaeda and was not directly connected to the clip, according to the news network’s sources. As more than one person has pointed out, blocking access to a video from a specific country is also quite easy to get around, even for a technically-challenged viewer — and as Google itself noted, the offending video is available on any number of other websites apart from YouTube. So why bother censoring it?

In the past, Google has fought hard against attempts by governments in countries such as Turkey to censor the content on YouTube, and in many cases those countries have responded by blocking the website entirely (as Afghanistan said it had done on Wednesday in response to the Muhammad video). The company maintains a database of these kinds of requests from governments as part of its “transparency report,” and even when it does agree to remove certain kinds of content from either YouTube or its search results — as it does in countries like Germany, where Nazi-related commentary is illegal — it does so under protest.

Should Google alone be making the decision to censor?

Jillian York, the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in an email to me that allowing even controversial videos like the Muhammad clip to remain online was an important principle for Google and YouTube to uphold, despite the connection to violence:

“It definitely troubles me… I think it’s wrong of Google to play Internet police here. They shouldn’t censor without a court order.”

The Libyan video case reinforces how much control companies like Google and YouTube have over what kinds of content we can see and when, and more importantly where. Even Twitter said earlier this year that it has the ability to block access to specific tweets on a country-by-country basis — although the company said that it would only exercise that power as a last resort when asked to do so by a court or government. As we’ve discussed before, this kind of control over information in the hands of a few corporate information gatekeepers raises a host of important questions about freedom of speech in a digital age.

Google’s decision to block the video clip may have been made with the best of intentions, but if the connection between the violence and the video is as flimsy as it seems — and if no government, court or other external authority has requested that it be censored — then why take this kind of step in the first place? All it does is highlight the fact that the company can remove or block content any time it wishes to, regardless of whether doing so is ethically or legally justifiable. And that is a troubling prospect indeed.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Hoggarazzi and Petteri Sulonen

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

By now, many people are familiar with the story of how NPR editor Andy Carvin used Twitter to create a kind of crowdsourced newswire during the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East last year, inventing a brand-new kind of journalism on the fly and in full public view. In a discussion with me on Thursday in Toronto about the lessons that can be learned from his experience, Carvin made some interesting points about the value of such an approach — including the importance of being transparent about the process, and the virtues of being human.

The discussion at the Mesh 2012 conference (full disclosure: I am a co-founder) touched on a number of different elements of what Carvin did during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, including two important factors that allowed him to take on the role that he did. The first was the nature of his job at NPR, which — as a senior digital strategist — allowed him to experiment with new tools and take risks. The second was the fact that he already had a number of contacts in the Middle East through his work with Global Voices and other social advocacy groups (Harvard researcher and author David Weinberger, whom I also interviewed at the conference, live-blogged the session with Carvin).

Both of these meant that Carvin was perfectly positioned to do what he did when dissidents started revolting in Tunisia, and then following that in Egypt and Libya. He also noted with a laugh that “it helps when you have ADHD” (which he does), because for several months during the height of those revolutions, he was spending almost every waking minute reading or posting on Twitter, managing several lists of dissidents and thousands of responses from followers. His peak output reached 1,400 tweets a day at one point, whereupon Twitter blocked his account as spam.

Not a newswire, but a crowdsourced newsroom of public editors

But Carvin also talked about how he approached the reporting of real-time events on Twitter, and how he doesn’t really like having what he did called a “newswire.” Instead, he says he prefers to think of it as a crowdsourced newsroom — with him as the reporter, or the anchor (or “news DJ,” another term he likes to use) pulling in reports from different places, and then relying on his followers to act as editors and sources, fact-checking and verifying and also distributing the news that he was curating. As he put it:

I get uncomfortable when people prefer my twitter feed as a newswire. It’s not a newswire. It’s a newsroom. It’s where I’m trying to separate fact from fiction, interacting with people. That’s a newsroom.

In many cases, Carvin says, this process worked remarkably well — and quickly. In one photo of Egypt, for example, someone he asked for an opinion said that the corner of a building in the background was clearly a prominent local landmark, and then sent a link to a Google Earth view of the building, allowing Carvin to confirm within minutes that it was the same location. He also gave his followers what he called “fire drills,” in which he would ask them to fact-check photos that he knew were fake and then he would look at how many errors they found.

And what happened when he made a mistake and posted something that wasn’t accurate? In one case, he distributed a photo he thought was of a woman who had been shot in battle and was being attended to by nurses — but it turned out she was actually dead, his followers told him, and her body was being prepared for burial. Carvin says he admitted his mistake multiple times, and then retweeted both the criticisms and the corrections as broadly as possible:

You have to be prepared to be accountable in real time. When I screw up, my followers tell me.

News as a process, and the virtues of being human

The NPR editor, who is now working on a book about his experiences, says he believes in the “news as a process” approach, as author Jeff Jarvis and others have described it — in which not only is the reporting of an event crowdsourced in real time, but new information is added and mistakes are also corrected by readers, who journalism professor Jay Rosen has called “the people formerly known as the audience” (recent events have also shown how social networks like Twitter and Reddit can act as fact-checking engines).

As I tried to argue in a Twitter debate on Friday with a number of people (which Craig Silverman of the Poynter Institute curated with Storify) I think there is a lot of public value in doing what Carvin did, by assembling and fact-checking and correcting information in real time. That’s not to say editors don’t have value, or that reporters shouldn’t try to report things as accurately as possible. But when errors are made, I think admitting them publicly and being seen to correct them (not something traditional media is very good at) actually builds trust.

For me — and I think for Carvin — doing this is connected to a larger principle, and that is the value of being human, and of expressing that humanity, even if it means acknowledging a mistake. The NPR editor also admitted that in some cases he was so disturbed by the videos and images he was seeing from Egypt and elsewhere that he responded on Twitter in a way that he says might not have been professional — but he still felt was justified. As Weinberger noted in his live-blog: “Andy perfectly modeled a committed journalist who remains personal, situated, transparent, and himself.”

This is the kind of thing that mainstream media outlets discourage, just as many try to avoid admitting that they have made mistakes. Restrictive social-media policies put in place by many of these outlets seem designed to remove as many of the elements of being human as possible from the practice of being a journalist — which I think is the exact opposite of what needs to happen if traditional journalism is to survive. And I think Andy Carvin is a pretty good example of what one possible future of real-time, crowdsourced journalism actually looks like.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Luc Legay and personaldemocracy

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Best practices in optimizing content for social engagement
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012

As we have described a number of times at GigaOM, journalism has become something virtually anyone can practice now, thanks to social tools and digital media. This democratization of distribution has had a profound effect on the coverage of uprisings in Egypt and Libya and more recently in Syria. Thanks to YouTube, Twitter and other networks, more information is available about what is happening in those countries. But is it reliable? According to some reports, the news coming from Syria has been altered by activists who are trying to make a specific point. Does that mean citizen journalism is flawed? Not really. It just means that we need better tools to make sense of the flood of news that is all around us.

As Britain’s Channel 4 described in a recent piece about the rise of citizen journalism in Syria, dozens of video bloggers have emerged who are literally risking their lives to bring video evidence of the violence there to the world: In at least one case, a video blogger died while live streaming a demonstration. While the death of veteran Sunday Times foreign correspondent Marie Colvin in February got a lot of attention, so far not much has been paid to the “citizen journalists” who are putting themselves in similar situations. In a piece on Colvin’s death, New York Times media writer David Carr said that foreign reporting requires more than just “clicking on a YouTube video.”

Citizen journalism often comes with a viewpoint

Carr is right, at least in the sense that what is missing when we try to understand a place like Syria or Egypt through YouTube videos or Twitter is context. How do we know the videos or reports we are getting are true? Channel 4 said on Tuesday that it has discovered at least one video of the city of Homs was altered by the person who uploaded it, with a cloud of smoke added to the picture.

The video journalist who took the video admitted that he altered it and said he did so to raise awareness of the violence taking place in the city so the world would respond. This sounds a lot like the arguments that some observers made in defense of Mike Daisey, whose report on Public Radio International about visiting Apple factories in China turned out to be partially fiction. Some — including Daisey — said his embellishments were justified because they exposed a larger truth about Apple and its conduct in China, while others said any altering of facts made the entire story suspect.

One of the issues in a place like Syria or Egypt is that much of the reporting we get from nonmainstream sources almost inevitably comes from people who are either involved with a rebel group or are friendly toward it (although it should be noted this is the case with much traditional foreign reporting as well). This phenomenon was also seen during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, when video reporters like Tim Pool emerged to tell the story of the protests and developed a large following very quickly, despite making it clear that they didn’t see themselves as journalists.

Traditional and citizen journalism are not adversaries

One response to this phenomenon is to lament the loss of traditional foreign reporting, as Carr seemed to be doing in his tribute to Colvin, and criticize the emptiness or unreliability of YouTube videos and citizen journalism. But another response is to see the value of the phenomenon — as Nick Kristof of the NYT seemed to in comments he made about citizen journalism and the Occupy movement — and try to apply journalistic principles to this maelstrom of content coming from a thousand different sources, some reliable and some not. This is what the BBC does with its user-generated-content desk, which sits in the newsroom and filters and verifies reports coming from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

This is also what Andy Carvin of National Public Radio has been doing with his Twitter account ever since the Arab Spring revolutions broke out in Tunisia and Egypt. As he described in a recent interview with Current.org, Carvin sees Twitter as the place where he does the majority of his journalism — and where his followers act simultaneously as sources, fact-checkers, editors and distributors:

It’s not that I’m just using Twitter and integrating other forms of journalism — it’s that I see Twitter as the newsroom where I spend my time.

Whenever I write about what Carvin is doing, someone inevitably makes the argument that what he is doing isn’t “real” journalism, which presumably consists of flying to these locations and reporting on camera the way we are used to. The argument seems to be that since Carvin is sitting at his desk monitoring Twitter (and using the telephone), that he isn’t really doing journalism. As I have argued before, this is absurd. Carvin is applying exactly the same journalistic principles that traditional reporters always have, including the duty to verify facts. He is simply applying them in real time and in full public view, which is arguably better than the traditional alternative.

Citizen journalism and the rise of social media don’t mean that we don’t need traditional foreign correspondents anymore, or traditional reporting. If anything, we need those kinds of skills even more than we ever have. But the globe-trotting war correspondent is no longer the only game in town when taxi drivers can report bombings just as easily as a CNN crew, and training the new breed of curator journalists may involve Twitter and YouTube lessons instead of flak jackets. In the end, as Jay Rosen has said many times, journalism gets better when there are more people doing it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Petteri Sulonen and Yan Arief Purwanto

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure

So much is possible with the digital tools we have today: Google provides information from billions of sources instantly; Facebook lets us stay in touch with friends around the globe; and Twitter allows anyone to broadcast their thoughts wherever they are. But with all this freedom comes a tradeoff, as Twitter’s censorship news reinforced for many this week. In each case, we are essentially at the mercy of the company whose network we are using (and being used by). If Google doesn’t like your name, it can block you; if Facebook doesn’t like your status, it can delete it; and if Twitter gets a takedown request for your message, it will disappear. Our freedom of speech relies on these new information gatekeepers.

On Thursday, Twitter announced it now has the ability to censor individual tweets within certain countries. Although the company made a point of stressing it will only do this in extreme cases, where it is required to do so by law — in Germany, for example, where promoting Nazi principles is a crime — the news produced a wave of criticism from users and Twitter critics about how the information network was “committing social suicide” and caving in to dictators and authoritarian governments. Although Twitter said it would be as transparent as possible, and it appears to be possible to work around the blocking of tweets, the impact of the news was still negative for many.

#TwitterCensorship. Dear Twitter, I face so much censorship in Sudan as a journalist, you were my free and safe space. I'm grieving now.—
ريم ايس كريم (@ReemShawkat) January 27, 2012

Some wondered whether the move was connected to the investment by Saudi billionaire prince Alwaleed bin Talal, while others have been muttering conspiracy theories about Twitter censoring the #Occupy hashtag from its trending topics (which the company has repeatedly denied doing). For every balanced perspective from an observer like Jillian York at the Electronic Frontier Foundation or sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who argued that the policy was positive, there is a rant from someone about how Twitter has failed to uphold its promise as a bastion of free speech. Even high-profile Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei said ”if Twitter starts censoring, I’ll stop tweeting.”

Trust is the currency in our relationship with networks

Google has been riding the slippery slope of user trust recently as well, after criticism that its new personalized search features are an attempt to use its market power to promote its own Google+ social network — something that not only irritated competitors like Twitter and Facebook, but made some (including me) question whether the search giant had turned its back on the promise it made to users in 2004 to provide objective search results. The outcry over the changes then spilled over onto Google’s new privacy policy, which drew fire from privacy advocates and users despite the fact that little had changed.

The common thread in both of these incidents is trust, and the perception on the part of some users — and government regulators as well, in Google’s case — that Google and Twitter are both losing some of what made them unique. In Google’s case, an objectivity or purity in its results, and in Twitter’s case, a sense of freedom and openness (rightly or wrongly) about the network and users’ ability to publish whatever and wherever they wish. Twitter’s changes seemed especially disappointing to some because of how powerful that freedom was during the events of the Arab Spring in Egypt and elsewhere.

Facebook may not have touched off any storms this week on the trust front, but it is an old hand at disappointing users, whether it’s by changing privacy settings without telling them, tracking users even when they aren’t logged in or removing content in what some allege is an attempt at censorship of certain topics. Google and Facebook have also irritated users by requiring the use of real names, which critics argue benefits the companies and their attempts to serve advertisers more than it does users.

Principles are important, but these are businesses too

These are businesses with corporate interests, not triumphant defenders of free speech — and they each provide the bulk of their services for free, and make money by selling their users’ attention to advertisers. General counsel Alex Macgillivray says Twitter is committed to being “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” and the company says it would never use its new powers to block tweets during an event like the Arab Spring, or prevent dissidents in Iran or China from using it to further their cause. But how do we know this for sure? We don’t.

The standard response when someone criticizes Google’s privacy policy or Twitter’s new tactics or Facebook’s changes is “Don’t use them.” But what’s the alternative? Google isn’t just a search engine, but a giant email provider, and has a host of other services people need to do their jobs. Facebook and Twitter are tools that hundreds of millions of people use daily to connect and share with their friends and family — which is why “open source” alternatives such as Diaspora and Identi.ca have failed to gain much traction.

Dave Winer and other open-network advocates have repeatedly made the point that relying on a single corporation, or even several of them, for access to such important tools of communication is a huge risk. But what choice do we have? We either have to try harder to find more open alternatives, or we have to trust that Google and Twitter and Facebook are looking out for our best interests — and when they don’t, we have to make it clear that they are failing, and hold them to account.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Jennifer Moo and Richard Engel, NBC

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
• How publishers must adapt to multiple content discovery options
• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013

Late last year, the board that oversees the journalism prizes named after newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer changed the definition of its “breaking news” award to stress the real-time nature of the category. This led to speculation about whether someone who used Twitter as a reporting tool — the way that Andy Carvin of National Public Radio did during the Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere last year, for example — might be eligible for one. But a spokesman for the Pulitzer board said on Monday that he would not, because Twitter is not considered a news entity for the purposes of the prize. But should it be?

Just to recap, the Pulitzer board changed the “breaking news” award definition in what appeared to be an attempt to stress the real-time nature of the category (and also perhaps because there were no winners of the award in 2011). Instead of mentioning the use of various tools, as the previous definition did, the new version simply said that the award should be presented for a distinguished example of breaking news that:

[A]s quickly as possible, captures events accurately as they occur, and, as times passes, illuminates, provides context and expands upon the initial coverage.

Real-time news, but must be on a website

In discussing the changes, the Pulitzer board also said that “it would be disappointing if an event occurred at 8 a.m. and the first item in an entry was drawn from the next day’s newspaper.” As Justin Ellis of the Nieman Journalism Lab noted at the time, these changes seemed tailor made for a nomination that might include the use of Twitter — such as live-tweeting a breaking news event. Although the specific award is intended for what the board calls “local reporting,” I thought the same description could more or less cover what Andy Carvin did during the revolutions in Egypt.

But when I asked Sig Gissler — the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes since 2002, and a faculty member at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism — he replied via email that what Carvin did wouldn’t be eligible for a prize because:

[E]ntered material must appear on an eligible news site — meaning a site operated by a U.S. news organization that publishes at least weekly during the calendar year and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles.

Gissler also noted (as Carvin himself did in a response on Twitter after the changes to the breaking-news award description) that Pulitzer prizes are typically only awarded to newspapers, not broadcast entities such as National Public Radio. But the main point seemed to be that reporting a news event using Twitter wouldn’t be enough to qualify unless that reporting appeared on — or was associated with — a “U.S. news organization that publishes at least weekly… and adheres to the highest journalistic principles.”

Journalism no longer occurs only in newspapers

Obviously, the Pulitzer board is entitled to award its prizes in whatever way it sees fit. But will it be overlooking some potentially game-changing and arguably historic examples of breaking news journalism if it sticks to that definition? I think so. Whether Carvin fits the traditional definition of a journalist or not, the reporting that he did around Egypt using only a Twitter account — and tools such as Storify for collecting that reporting — comes pretty close. Some have criticized his work as being just aggregation, but the reality is that Carvin verified and reported and did all of the other things that journalists do.

In effect, Carvin did all of the same things that the BBC does with its “user-generated content” desk, which tries to filter, verify and then report what comes in via Twitter and other social tools like Flickr and YouTube — but he did it single-handedly. Should he be penalized for that, or watch some other outlet get credit for embedding his Twitter stream on their newspaper website? Should Brian Stelter of the New York Times get more credit simply because his Twitter coverage of the tornado in Missouri happened to be associated with a newspaper, even though it appeared on his Twitter account and his Tumblr blog?

Like many other traditional journalistic institutions, the Pulitzer board is eventually going to have to come to grips with the fact that journalism is becoming a much more elusive concept than it used to be — not only is it no longer confined to the simple boxes labelled “newspaper” or “broadcast,” but some of those engaging in it don’t fit the traditional labels either. That doesn’t mean they aren’t committing acts of journalism, just that our vocabulary hasn’t kept up with the changes in the industry.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and Yan Arief Purwanto

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook and the future of our online lives
• How Media Companies Can Compete Online
• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies

Should Internet access be seen as a fundamental human right, in the same category as the right to free speech or clean drinking water? The United Nations says it should, but in a New York Times  op-ed, one of the fathers of the Internet argues it shouldn’t. Vint Cerf is the co-creator of the TCP/IP standard the global computer network is built on, so when he says something about the impact of the Internet, it’s probably worth paying attention to. But is he right? And what are the implications if he’s wrong?

Cerf’s position is somewhat surprising because, as even he acknowledges in his piece for the NYT, the events of the “Arab Spring” in 2011 reinforced just how powerful internet access can be when it comes to enabling dissidents in places like Egypt and Tunisia to co-ordinate their efforts and bring down authoritarian governments — despite attempts by dictators in those countries to shut down their access. Cerf is also the “chief Internet evangelist” at Google, so it seems a little odd he would be downplaying the need for widespread internet access and the benefits that it brings to society.

Cerf: Access is not a right, but it enables other rights

In a nutshell, Cerf’s argument seems to be that if we define Internet access itself as a right, we are placing the focus on the wrong thing. The ‘Net, he says, is just a technological tool that enables us to exercise other fundamental rights, such as the right to free speech or access to information — and rights should not be awarded to tools, but to the ends that they enable us to reach. As he puts it:

[T]echnology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things.

In the past, says Cerf, we might have seen access to a horse as being a fundamental right in some way, since horses were a requirement for making a living. But the important thing to protect in that equation would be the right to make a living, he says, not necessarily the right to own a horse. Later in his essay, Cerf says a case could be made for seeing access to the Internet as a civil right — that is, a right awarded to us by governments, rather than one that exists inherently in us as human beings — but he shies away from arguing that this should be protected by governments.

One of the arguments against seeing Internet access as a fundamental right is that doing this places all kinds of potential burdens on society — including the potential costs of delivering access to millions or potentially billions of people. Although Cerf doesn’t raise this point, author and former Cato Institute director Adam Thierer makes that case in a post at the Technology Liberation Front, saying anyone who supports Internet access as a right has to answer two important questions: “Who or what pays the bill for classifying the Internet or broadband as a birthright entitlement? [and] what are the potential downsides for competition and innovation from such a move?”

What does seeing access as a right mean?

Thierer argues that not only could ensuring that kind of fundamental right bankrupt governments or societies if followed to its logical conclusion (and should it be just simple access, or is high-speed a right as well?) but that areas where things are determined to be “essential” services often suffer from a lack of competition. In other words, Thierer says, by promoting Internet access for all as a right, governments could actually wind up retarding progress by making it difficult for new entrants to compete:

[C]ompetition often doesn’t develop — or is sometimes prohibited outright — in sectors or for networks that are declared “essential” facilities or technological entitlements. That’s not because they are natural monopolies, rather, it’s because the policies that lawmakers and regulators put in place to ensure universal service ultimately have the counter-productive impact of retarding new entry.

But whether we define Internet access as a fundamental human right or simply a civil right, aren’t we taking a risk by not calling it a right at all? I think we are — and the risk is that it makes it easier for governments to place restrictions on access or even shut it down entirely (a point the United Nations made in its recent report). As JD Rucker notes in a blog post, seeing Internet access as a right is no different from seeing access to medical treatment or clean drinking water as a right. Cars may not be a right, but the ability to move about freely certainly is — and the internet is more like the highway system than it is a car or a horse.

That’s not to say governments have to bankrupt themselves to ensure that everyone has fiber to the curb by their house, only that protections and principles need to be in place that make it available wherever possible — just as we try to make housing and food available to all, not necessarily mansions and high-end restaurants. The Internet is a fundamental method of communication and connection, and is becoming more fundamental all the time, as we’ve seen in the Middle East and elsewhere. Seeing it as a right is an important step towards making it available to as many people as possible.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Ryan Franklin and Ray Dehler

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• How social discovery is transforming entertainment
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

Destabilized by the collapse of its dictatorial regime and governed by military forces, Egypt is a dangerous place to be a dissident, especially one who has drawn the government’s fire by blogging and tweeting about its failings. For Mona El Tahawy, who was arrested and tortured by Egyptian security forces last week, that profile may have made her a target — but it also helped her quickly assemble a network of supporters and a Twitter campaign that eventually freed her from her captors. As with the revolution that swept Egypt’s president from power, Twitter may not have been the ultimate cause, but it clearly played a crucial role in the eventual outcome.

El Tahawy is a freelance journalist who grew up in Egypt and got her journalism degree from the University of Cairo, and worked for news outlets such as Reuters and The Guardian before moving to New York. The “Arab Spring” revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt drew her back to her homeland, and she has been reporting on and blogging about the turmoil there ever since. For many, including NPR reporter Andy Carvin — who has become a one-man newswire reporting on the events in the Arab world via Twitter — she has become one of the key sources of information from the region.

News of El Tahawy’s capture spread quickly

As detailed in a Storify archive of the incident, on Wednesday evening — after having posted a number of comments to Twitter about the demonstrations in Tahrir Square — El Tahawy posted a single tweet that said she had been arrested by the country’s security forces:

Beaten arrested in interior ministry—
Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy) November 24, 2011

The news sent shockwaves through the network of Egypt-watchers who follow El Tahawy on Twitter, and one of them was sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who has made a study of the use of social media during the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. As Tufekci describes in a blog post about the incident, she quickly decided to use her connections to raise awareness about her journalist friend’s arrest and torture. Others, including Andy Carvin at NPR, had also started posting about the news and a hashtag quickly emerged: #freemona.

Within 20 minutes, Tufekci says, the hashtag was trending worldwide — thanks to the network of Twitter users who follow both the sociologist and other influential accounts like Carvin’s. One of those Egypt-watchers made sure everyone knew she had contacted the U.S. Embassy about the incident, since El Tahawy is a U.S. citizen. Tufekci and Carvin both reached out to another member of their network: Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor and former advisor to Senator Hillary Clinton. She in turn reached out to her contacts at the State Department.

Concise, fast, global, public and connected

As Tufekci notes in her post, while the Egyptian government and military forces may be despotic in many ways, it is still sensitive to international pressure — and that includes the kind of social pressure that can be applied when a high-profile case such as El Tahawy’s hits the news. While in some cases publicity can backfire and make those holding a dissident dig in their heels even further, with the Egyptian government, Tufekci and others believed that such pressure would help loosen their grip. And that appeared to be the case, since El Tahawy was released 12 hours later, with a broken arm and a broken wrist from being assaulted by her captors.

So did Twitter cause El Tahawy’s release? As with the original demonstrations in Egypt that led to the removal of its dictatorial president, there’s bound to be debate about what role social media played. But as Tufekci has noted in her research about those demonstrations, one of the crucial factors Twitter and Facebook bring to the table during such events is the ability to spread the information broadly in a short space of time, which can in turn help convince others that taking action is worthwhile — creating a sense of momentum behind such events. In El Tahawy’s case, she says:

A few decades ago, contemplating launching a global campaign like this would require that I own, say, a television station or two. Concise, fast, global, public and connected was what we needed, and, for that, there is nothing better than Twitter.

Twitter makes it easier for ad hoc networks to form

Would El Tahawy have been released if Twitter and the kinds of real-time connections Tufekci describes in her post didn’t exist? Possibly. But her release could easily have taken weeks or even months, and perhaps even longer — as news of her capture slowly filtered out through traditional media sources, and then back-room diplomacy took its course. Tufekci and others could probably have emailed or called their contacts at the State Department, and the New York Times  might have eventually written about it. But there would not have been the same instantaneous public spotlight that Twitter shone on El Tahawy’s capture.

As Tufekci says in her post about the incident, proving cause and effect with social networks like Twitter is almost impossible. But what it clearly did in this case was speed up the process, and make it easier for an ad-hoc network of influential individuals to shine a light on El Tahawy’s capture — and that, combined with her own high-profile status as an American citizen and journalist, likely made the difference. Obviously, many other Egyptian dissidents remain in prison or detention, and not all of them can be freed in a similar manner for a variety of reasons.

That said, however, one of the things that dictators and repressive governments of all kinds hate the most is public knowledge of their actions — and in that sense, Twitter is one of the fastest and most efficient transparency machines in existence. On top of that, it makes collective action in such situations much easier and more effective, and that has profound implications not just in Egypt but for governments everywhere.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen and Wikimedia

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013
• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies