Antony Loewenstein

The Indian edition of my book The Blogging Revolution was recently released. Here’s a just published review in The Telegraph from Calcutta:

The Blogging Revolution: How the newest media is changing politics, business and culture in India, China, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Cuba and Saudi Arabia By Antony Loewenstein, Jaico, Rs 350

Antony Loewenstein’s book is an intelligent examination of the dichotomous character of the internet, a force that can be both “liberating and restrictive”. Political analysts have often excitedly pointed at the arms of the new media — Facebook, Twitter, blogs — as catalysts for the Arab Spring that toppled several autocratic regimes in the Muslim world. As proof, they refer to the spark that was lit in Tunisia. When a street vendor immolated himself to protest against harassment by authorities, irate local people posted the video of his death on Facebook. Al-Jazeera distributed the video on its network, starting a fire that singed despotic regimes in the region. Loewenstein’s journeys across Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China and his interactions with online dissenters have given him the leverage to posit a caveat in this respect. The internet, he argues, has crystallized into a critical platform for disseminating information among dissidents. But it remains only one of the many arrows in the quiver in the battle for democracy.

Loewenstein bolsters his argument by citing the failure of the ‘Green Revolution’ in Iran. All the factors needed for yet another revolution inspired by the ‘web’ was in place: a repressive regime, tech-savvy youth, YouTube videos of State violence, and so on. Yet Ahmadinejad could not be dislodged from his throne. If anything, the tables have been turned on anonymous dissidents by regimes in China, Russia and Iran that are covertly colluding with technology companies to root out online dissent. Loewenstein’s research reveals that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are competing to design effective deterrents to curb freedom in cyberspace. Significantly, the institutional backlash against online dissidence has borrowed heavily from the rule-book of dissenters. Iran, for instance, has assisted in the formation of individual religious blogs to counter ‘revolutionary propaganda’.

The Blogging Revolution dismantles several other half-truths. In mainstream media, dissidence is often glorified, but journalists seldom pay attention to the forlornness of the enterprise. Here, we come across an Egyptian dissident who confides that his battle against the State has left him terribly lonely. He seems to echo the pain of the Cuban woman activist who confesses her estrangement from her son on account of her opposition to Castro.

Loewenstein also punctures the claim that cyber dissent has helped forge a pan-Arab nationalism. He unearths the ethnic tensions that continue to brew in Syria over the question of Iraqi refugees, thereby exposing new faultliness that are eroding old ties based on identity.

Online campaigns are not only about democracy. For the women respondents, the war is also against regressive norms and their proponents. An Iranian artist complains that she cannot exhibit her work in Iran; an Egyptian blogger reveals that she finds the views of the Muslim Brotherhood extreme. It is heartening to see Loewenstein address the question of women’s empowerment to suggest that the battle against tyranny is complex and layered, and that political change is meaningless without social transition.

Loewenstein should also be thanked for his attempt to democratize information. He is aware that the debased culture of contemporary reportage often prioritizes Western hegemony and interests. His unembedded travels help liberate voices that are seldom accommodated in the mainstream Western media. A Saudi blogger insists that change can never be imposed from the outside on the Muslim world. He could have been speaking for nearly every other dissident. Their views offer compelling evidence for the West to temper its campaign to project the new media as a tool to engineer revolution in the Muslim world.

Loewenstein’s book would also be of use to Indian readers and journalists. The latter, who often succumb to the lure of sensationalism, will find in it a template for objective reporting. Loewenstein’s sympathies may lie with the oppressed but he does not allow his sentiments to cloud his broader objectives. His prose thus remains dispassionate, economical, and nearly always enquiring. As for Indian readers, this book will perhaps make them value their freedom of expression and remind them not to take that right for granted. It will also make them wary of seemingly innocuous developments such as the minister for human resources directing social networking sites to remove ‘objectionable’ content or the judiciary mulling over guidelines for the media in India.

But what of the future, both in the real and cyber world? Even after revolutions — whether or not aided by the social media— things may remain unchanged. In Egypt, recently freed from the shadow of Mubarak, a blogger was imprisoned for criticizing the military. Loewenstein reminds us that it is imperative for dissident bloggers to remain engaged with the injustices that are perpetrated not just in repressive states but also in the free world.

An Iranian blogger had once written that every light that remains switched on in Teheran at night showed that “somebody is sitting behind [sic] a computer, driving through [sic] information road; and that is in fact a storehouse of gun powder that, if ignited, will start a great firework in the capital of the revolutionary Islam”. That light, Loewenstein urges, should never be turned off.

UDDALAK MUKHERJEE

My following book review appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald:

THE NET DELUSION
Evgeny Morozov
Allen Lane,
408pp, $29.95

As people in the Middle East have been protesting in the streets against Western-backed dictators and using social media to connect and circumvent state repression, it would be easy to dismiss The Net Delusion as almost irrelevant.

Born in Belarus, Evgeny Morozov collects mountains of evidence to claim the internet isn’t able to bring freedom, democracy and liberalism.

Sceptics would tell him to watch Al-Jazeera and see the power of the Facebook generation in action.

In fact, it is a dangerous fantasy to believe, he argues, because countless regimes are using the same tools as activists – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and email – to monitor and catch dissidents.

He writes that “the only space where the West (especially the United States) is still unabashedly eager to promote democracy is in cyberspace. The Freedom Agenda is out; the Twitter Agenda is in.”

Morozov condemns “cyber-utopians” for wanting to build a world where borders are no more. Instead, he says these well-meaning people “did not predict how useful it would prove for propaganda purposes, how masterfully dictators would learn to use it for surveillance” and the increasingly sophisticated methods of web censorship.

Furthermore, Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Nokia and web security firms have all willingly colluded with a range of brutal states to turn a profit.

The Western media are largely to blame for creating the illusion of web-inspired democracy. During the Iranian uprisings in June 2009, many journalists dubbed it the Twitter Revolution, closely following countless tweets from the streets of Tehran. However, it was soon discovered that many of the tweets originated in California and not the Islamic republic. The myth had already been born.

None of these facts is designed to lessen the bravery of demonstrators against autocracies – and Morozov praises countless dissidents in China, the Arab world and beyond – but lazy journalists seemingly crave easy and often inaccurate narratives of nimble young keyboard warriors against sluggish old men in golden palaces.

The New York Times’s Roger Cohen was right when he wrote in January that “the internet’s impact has been to expose the great delusion that has led Western governments to buttress Arab autocrats; that the only alternative to them was Islamic jihadists”.

But most protesters in the streets of Egypt had no access to the internet or any use for it and the main gripes were economic rather than ideological. However, it is undeniable that many of the young organised through online networks and clearly surprised the former Mubarak regime with their ability to harness a mainstream call for change.

Morozov, hailing from a country that knows about disappearances and suppression, urges the West to “stop glorifying those living in authoritarian governments”.

One of the Western fallacies of web usage in non-democratic nations is the belief that people are all looking for political content as a way to cope with repression. In fact, as Morozov proves with research, an experiment in 2007 with strangers in autocratic regimes found that instead of looking for dissenting material they “searched for nude pictures of Gwen Stefani and photos of a panty-less Britney Spears”.

I noted similar trends in China when researching my book The Blogging Revolution and found most Chinese youth were interested in downloading movies and music and meeting boys and girls. Politics was the furthest thing from their minds.

This would change only if economic conditions worsened. A wise government would pre-empt these problems by allowing citizens to let off steam; Beijing has undoubtedly opened up online debate in the past decade, though there are certainly set boundaries and red lines not to cross.

Morozov sometimes underestimates the importance of people in repressive states feeling less alone and mixing with like-minded individuals. Witness the persecuted gay community in Iran, the websites connecting this beleaguered population and the space to discuss an identity denied by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ultimately, The Net Delusion is necessary because it challenges comfortable Western thinking about the modern nature of authoritarianism.

This year we have already been left to ponder the irony of the US State Department deploying its resources to pressure Arab regimes not to block communications and social media while the stated agenda of Washington is a matrix of control across the region.

These policies are clearly contradictory and a person in US-backed Saudi Arabia and Bahrain won’t be fooled into believing Western benevolence if they can merely use Twitter every day.

Iranian dissidents clearly need more global support but surely backing from the US government is sending the completely wrong message?

At a time when the Obama administration is pressing for harsher sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program, democracy advocates in Iran have been celebrating the recent decision by the United States to lift sanctions on various online services, which they say only helped Tehran to suppress the opposition.

But it is still a long way from the activists’ goal of lifting all restrictions on trade in Internet services, which opposition leaders say is vital to maintaining the open communications that have underpinned the protests that erupted last summer after the disputed presidential election. In recent months the government has carried out cyberwarfare against the opposition, eliminating virtually all sources of independent news and information and shutting down social networking services.

The sanctions against online services — provided through free software like Google Chat or Yahoo Messenger — were intended to restrict Iran’s ability to develop nuclear technology, but democracy advocates say they ended up helping the government repress its people. “The policies were contradictory,” said Ali Akbar Moussavi Khoini, a former member of Parliament who now lives in Washington, where he pressed for the change.

The new measure will enable users in Iran to download the latest circumvention software to help defeat the government’s efforts to block Web sites, and to stop relying on pirated copies that can be far more easily hacked by the government.

But the government’s opponents say they need still more help in getting around the government’s information roadblocks.

“The Islamic Republic is very efficient in limiting people’s access to these sources, and Iranian people need major help,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, the founder of one of the largest Persian-language social networking Web sites, the United States-based Balatarin. “We need some 50 percent of people to be able to access independent news sources other than the state-controlled media.”

What is the effect of Washington’s recent decision to allow web companies such as Google and Yahoo to operate in closed societies, such as Cuba and Iran?

My following article appears today on ABC Unleashed/The Drum:

Google has threatened to withdraw entirely from China in protest at the authoritarian regime’s oppressive online censorship and continuing attempts by Chinese hackers to gain sensitive information of local human rights workers.

Perhaps most significantly, Google’s Chinse search engine, Google.cn, now allows once banned material to be displayed, such as images of the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square. A few people even placed flowers outside the company’s offices in Beijing as a sign of respect and perhaps admiration for the company’s position.

It is a highly unusual move by a multinational with roughly 30 percent market share in an internet market of over 350 million people, the largest in the world. Furthermore, it recognises the increasing pressure placed on the company by Communist officials, including the banning of YouTube, attempts to illegally gain corporate information and persistent efforts by hackers to discover the private details of dissenters on Gmail.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the Open Space Institute and an expert on the Chinese Internet, told the New York Times that, “Unless they turn themselves into a Chinese company, Google could not win. The company has clearly put its foot down and said enough is enough.”

A Google spokesman wrote in a blog posting on 12 January:

“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered – combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web – have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

News reports indicate that the Obama administration has been in negotiations with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco, companies with a long history of assisting Beijing in its censorship program, to implement a far-reaching initiative to help citizens in repressive regimes access banned online information. China is only the worst culprit of this growing trend; Iran is not far behind, especially since last year’s disputed election.

Despite Google’s seemingly brave move, already praised by human rights groups around the world, questions remain whether other large web firms will join them. It should be remembered that the country’s largest search engines, such as Baidu, are Chinese-owned and remain close to the regime. They are unlikely to follow Google’s lead.

The last months have seen cyber wars within China and from the outside heat up considerably. Chinese netizens have pledged to help their Iranian colleagues while government-backed activists from Iran moved to disable Chinese websites.

Chinese writer and blogger Alice Xin Liu argued earlier this month that the banning of increasing numbers of websites by paranoid authorities was both impossible to predict and avoid. She shared the news that officials are threatening to release a “white-list” of approved websites, with foreign websites forced to register before they launched or allowed to continue online.

Although some technology writers are cynical over Google’s latest stance (“More about business than thwarting evil”, says one), the company’s relationship with the Communist regime has never been especially close. It was slammed internationally for agreeing to censorship its search engine in the first place. Google’s global standing plummeted since 2006: “On a business level, that decision to censor…was a net negative,” co-founder Sergey Brin told the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2007.

When I visited China in 2007 during research for my book, The Blogging Revolution, I found widespread mistrust of the company. Although Gmail was regarded as far safer option than Hotmail or Yahoo!, the search engine was regarded as a pale imitation of Chinese equivalents.

The Great Firewall (GFW) is an ingenious system that doesn’t actually block all banned content. Instead, explains leading internet censorship expert Nart Villeneuve, “the GFW doesn’t have to be 100% technically effective, it just has to serve as a reminder to those in China about what content is acceptable and that which should be avoided. The objective is to influence behaviour toward self-censorship, so that most will not actively seek out banned information or the means to bypass controls and access it.”

My own research in China found a remarkable amount of material still existed that could be deemed controversial. Sexual content, political writings and corruption discussions remained available. The last decade has seen an explosion of once-forbidden issues now analysed, challenged and framed in the Chinese blogosphere. Crusading journalism is still possible in today’s China. This is not to deny the pervasive censorship regime but to highlight a more nuanced view of Beijing’s attitude towards its citizens.

The wider context for this story is the economic rise of China; the elephant in the room between Washington and Beijing. America fears a business and political rival and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded this week that China explains its ongoing cyber-attacks against Google and other firms. It was yet another warning from the super-power to the competitor snapping at its heels.

Veteran China watcher James Fallows argues that the significance of Google’s decision is the challenge to China’s “Bush-Cheney era”. China “is on a path at the moment that courts resistance around the world” but is not a threat to American hegemony.

The real agenda behind Google’s decision may never be known but it is unlikely to change in the short-term the Communist Party’s stranglehold on information. If the move forces Western companies to more closely examine their motives and practices in the dictatorship and the collusion that inevitably comes with this process, Google will have recovered a modicum of respect.

The state of human rights in Iran in 2009 has been grim and worsening.

Reporters Without Borders highlights the web apartheid (possibly backed by Western multinationals):

The authorities have also targeted the Internet in an attempt to extend their control to the new media. News websites that were likely to criticise Ahmadinejad’s victory, including around 10 opposition websites, were pre-emptively censored on 11 June, the eve of the election. Since then, every effort has been made to prevent news and information about the regime’s opponents circulating online.

This policy is continuing. Internet connections were slowed right down or blocked altogether in Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz on the eve of opposition demonstrations that were announced in advance, such as those on 4 November and 7 December.

The slow-down began earlier than usual before the latest protests on 7 December. Internet connections became very slow on 5 December, making it impossible to browse or send emails. Gmail and Yahoo welcome pages no longer displayed. “I wanted to send emails but even if the Gmail welcome page displayed, the ‘Send’ button did not,” one Iranian told Reporters Without Borders, referring to his Internet connection on 7 December.

While Iran erupts again with protesters against dictatorial rule, Reporters Without Borders finds massive attempts by authorities to shut down modern communications (a futile act, and only temporarily successful, that shows its desperation):

The Iranian censors targeted the new-generation media with renewed energy. The authorities have responded, blow by blow, to demonstrations in recent months but this is the first time that have acted with so much anticipation:

Internet connections been blocked or slow since 5 December, especially in Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz, making it difficult or impossible to surf the Internet or send emails, several sources in Iran told Reporters Without Borders. One referred ironically to broadband speeds of less than 56Kb (dial-up speed). The Gmail and Yahoo! welcome pages do not display. Access to proxies is haphazard, complicating the use of censorship circumvention methods to access such blocked websites as Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. Mobile phone and SMS service are also suspended or jammed in many parts of the country including Tehran.

Agence France-Presse quoted technicians as saying these problems were the result of a “decision by the authorities” rather than any breakdown in service. The main Internet service providers use the network of the state-owned Telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI) owned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Despite the existence of privately-owned companies, the state dominates this sector and any instructions it issues are immediately implemented.

My book The Blogging Revolution thoroughly examines the complicity of Western multinationals such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in assisting online censorship in oppressive regimes.

Nicholas Kristof in his blog on the New York Times discovers how shocking this situation has become. Lesson for the day; never trust the word of corporate executives (especially when we learn today that Microsoft may help News Corporation remove its content from Google, an utterly pointless act in an age of massive, online information):

Critics have accused President Obama of kowtowing to Chinese leaders, by failing to meet dissidents, toning down his criticisms and delaying a meeting with the Dalai Lama. On balance, I think that criticism is premature: Confrontation doesn’t help with China and can hurt, and so engagement becomes a fine line to navigate. The Obama visit wasn’t a ringing success, but neither was it a craven embarrassment.

For the latest craven kowtowing, we can look somewhere else: Microsoft and its new search engine, Bing.

Western corporations have often behaved embarrassingly in China, sacrificing any principles to ingratiate themselves with the Communist Party authorities. Yahoo was the worst, handing over information about several email account holders so that they could be arrested – and then dissembling and defending its monstrous conduct. Now Microsoft is sacrificing the integrity of Bing searches so as to cozy up to State Security in Beijing. In effect, it has chosen become part of the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus.

If you search a term on Bing that is politically sensitive in China, in English the results are legitimate. Search “Tiananmen” and you’ll find out about the army firing on pro-democracy protesters in 1989. Search Dalai Lama, Falun Gong and you also get credible results. Conduct the search in complex Chinese characters (the kind used in Taiwan and Hong Kong) and on the whole you still get authentic results.

But conduct the search with the simplified characters used in mainland China, then you get sanitized pro-Communist results. This is especially true of image searches. Magic! No Tiananmen Square massacre. The Dalai Lama becomes an oppressor. Falun Gong believers are villains, not victims.

What’s most offensive is that this is true wherever in the world the search is conducted – including in my office in New York. If Microsoft felt it had to bow to Chinese censorship within China’s borders, based on the IP address, that might be defensible. But when Microsoft skews its worldwide searches to make Hu Jintao feel better, that’s a disgrace. It becomes simply a unit of the Central Committee Propaganda Department.

The Iranian regime, already isolated internationally (well, the West doesn’t like her) continues to arrest dissenters.

But this news places the country in the dubious role of copying China’s most draconian web censorship:

On Wednesday, authorities temporarily blocked all access to e-mail programs such as Gmail and Yahoo during the demonstrations to prevent people from sending images to foreign media organizations. Still, many managed to upload cellphone clips to video sites, which were widely broadcast by foreign-based Farsi-language satellite channels.

The following article by Katrin Figge is published today in one of Indonesia’s largest English newspapers, The Jakarta Globe:

For a person who gets hate mail and death threats on a regular basis, Antony Loewenstein remains surprisingly cheerful.

The Jewish-Australian journalist, activist, blogger and author, who is based in Sydney, has stirred up plenty of controversy with his book “My Israel Question.” First published in 2006 and reprinted in a third edition several weeks ago, the book takes a critical look at the conflict between Israel and Palestine. As a self-proclaimed anti-Zionist and a supporter of the Palestinian cause, Loewenstein has been accused of anti-Semitism by many fellow Jews.

Ben Cubby of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote in a July review of “My Israel Question”: “To his critics, he is a ‘pro-Hezbollah cheerleader’ and ‘smouldering teen idol’ who is ‘working for the destruction of Israel’ through his ‘rabidly anti-Zionist agenda.’ ” He continued, “For a young writer whose first book has barely hit the shelves, Antony Loewenstein is quickly honing a reputation for getting under people’s skin.”

“I don’t want to suggest that I feel that my life is in jeopardy, I don’t want to exaggerate, but unfortunately, yes, I get a lot of attacks from Jewish people,” Loewenstein said during a phone interview last week, shortly before he set off for Bali and the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, which kicks off on Wednesday. It is his second visit to Bali. Loewenstein’s first time on the island was for a vacation.

“I was in Bali in March for a couple of weeks, but it was for a holiday,” Loewenstein said. “I loved it, and I am glad I am coming back and have the chance to see a bit more of the country.”

After the festival, he will visit several other cities, including Yogyakarta and Aceh, as part of a book tour. He plans to talk about the Middle East, the role of the United States in the region, Jewish identity and Palestinian nationalism.

“One of the interesting things for me about coming to the Ubud festival is to try to bridge the profound gap that exists between the English-speaking and the non-English speaking world,” he said.

He said he didn’t have much knowledge of Indonesian writers, not because he wasn’t interested, but mainly because of the language barrier.

“In the Western world, the literature of the non-English speaking countries is maybe not ignored, but certainly not highlighted as much as it should be,” he said. “I hope that in time this will change, especially with the help of a multilingual Internet.”

Loewenstein also published “The Blogging Revolution” in 2008.

“The main reason behind the book was a dissatisfaction with how the Western media reported on the rest of the world,” he said. “It started during and right after the Iraq war in 2003. It seemed to me extraordinary that in Australia and many parts of the West, there were very few Iraqi voices talking about the war.”

Internet blogs were one way for Loewenstein to get inside Iraq. He then decided to visit Cuba, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China — countries that he said are repressive but still have a vibrant and diverse Internet culture.

“There’s a great deal of online dissent in these countries,” Loewenstein said. “One of the things I wanted to talk about in the book was that the Internet on its own does not bring democracy, but what it does do in many countries, for example in Egypt, Iraq and China, is to bring issues to public attention.”

He talked to a number of people about why and how they were blogging, and especially about how they dealt with the censorship that exists in some of those countries.

“In places like China, for example, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo actually help the government to censor the Internet,” Loewenstein said. “To me, that is something profoundly disturbing that needed to be examined, while overall, I was trying to show how in the West we are willfully ignoring many voices that we could be listening to.”

He recently traveled to Israel and Palestine.

“I am very critical of the way Israel treats Palestinians, and I guess I just wanted to go there again and see it with my own eyes,” he said.

“It was despairing. The situation in Israel itself [is that] the country has moved very much to the right. In Palestine there is not much optimism despite Barack Obama coming in and talking about peace. Nothing has changed, nothing has been rebuilt.”

As someone who is Jewish, Loewenstein said, he felt profound shame about what his people were doing. This is one of the things he wants to speak about at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

“For many people, especially in the Muslim world, there is a need to hear Jews speaking critically of Israel,” Loewenstein said. “What Israel does in Palestine is unconscionable and has to be condemned.”

Antony Loewenstein will be speaking at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival this week.

Antony Loewenstein at the festival

October 9 2:15 – 3:30 p.m. Writing in the New World: Obama and Dissent, with Fatima Bhutto, Antony Loewenstein and Jamal Mahjoub Chair: Michael Vatikiotis
October 11 9 – 10 a.m. In Conversation: Antony Loewenstein Chair: Dominique Schwartz 4 – 5:30 p.m. A New Frontier: Blogging, Dissent and Solidarity, with Doel CP Allisah, Dian Hartati, Antony Loewenstein and Ng Yi-Sheng Chair: Angela Meyer

We reported some time ago on the complicity of Nokia in the recent Iranian crackdown. Western multinationals have become pretty good at working with authoritarian regimes (witness Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft in China.)

But now a backlash:

The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic to the post-election protest movement begin targeting a string of companies deemed to be collaborating with the regime.

Wholesale vendors in the capital report that demand for Nokia handsets has fallen by as much as half in the wake of calls to boycott Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for selling communications monitoring systems to Iran.

There are signs that the boycott is spreading: consumers are shunning SMS messaging in protest at the perceived complicity with the regime by the state telecoms company, TCI. Iran’s state-run broadcaster has been hit by a collapse in advertising as companies fear being blacklisted in a Facebook petition. There is also anecdotal evidence that people are moving money out of state banks and into private banks.

This news is welcome in a nation such as China where web repression is deep:

A Chinese academic has successfully sued an internet company for closing his website after he posted articles on subjects including corruption and environmental issues.

Hu Xingdou, professor of economics at the Beijing Institute of Technology, said he hoped his case would encourage other users to protect their rights and net censors to make decisions more responsibly.

“I was surprised when I won. In the past, there have been people suing like me, but either the court did not take the case or they failed. This is the first successful case in China of a netizen or internet user suing their internet service provider,” Hu told the Guardian.

I discuss in my book The Blogging Revolution about growing attempts by Chinese citizens to hold web companies to account, but I look forward to the day when Western firms like Google and Yahoo are fully investigated over their complicity.

Not unlike Shell is currently experiencing in a New York courtroom.