Top Five Internet Enemies

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Internet censorship in Australia is potentially about to get a lot worse. The Government’s proposed compulsory filtering scheme threatens to constrict the Internet in Aus to levels unheard of in Western democracies. Essentially, they want to filter content that is accessible on the web, so content deemed illegal cannot be viewed by users. The problem is that the proposed filter would be imprecise, expensive, slow down connection speeds, and generally bugger everyone around for the sake of policing a few sick creepshows. While opposition to the bizarrely archaic scheme is thankfully growing, we thought it might be worthwhile to test to waters to see where it might all be headed for Australia. In that vein, here are our top 5 worst countries for the Internet ever. Let’s hope we don’t end up on the list.
 
Thanks to the trade embargo with the United States, the Internet in Cuba is about as useful as a high school kid in a Che Guevara t-shirt. Cuba boasts the lowest amount of people with access to the web in the entire Western hemisphere, and strict censorship to keep everything happy and not “counter-revolutionary”. There are jail terms of up to 20 years for forwarding on that hilarious Photoshopped picture of Fidel groping Hugo Chaves (at least I’m assuming that was a Photoshop), and there are several tagged “subversive key words” that send the red phone ringing in the police office if entered into a computer.
 
Worst of all is that private Internet access is banned, meaning that if you want to go have a cheeky look at just what Mischa Barton is up to, you’ll have to head down to a state-monitored access point and probably pretend that she is Castro’s niece or something.
Having a military junta in charge of a country apparently doesn’t mean great things for the everyday Joe’s access to the Internet. Burma’s censorship regime has been called the “most extensive” in the world, with only around 400 people (out of 55 million) enjoying the sweet fruits of broadband access. Thanks to the army’s strict restrictions, if you’re sitting in front of a computer in Rangoon you won’t be able to look at anything even mildly critical of the state; nor Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, or (most gravely) pornography. Honestly, after a hard day of being oppressed at the office what Burmese wouldn’t want to come home to unwind with some horse-reaming-a-blonde action?
 
During the 2007 anti-government protests when the monks all got a bit uppity, Internet access was cut off from everyone in Burma. The junta’s excuse? “A break in an underwater cable.” Because that’s where the Internet comes from, right? The bottom of the ocean? Apparently.
 
So sure: There are a lot of countries that censor the Internet. But there is only one Internet Police Force. The brave boys of the Chinese Mainland Internet Police Bravery Squad (I just made up that title but it sounds about right) number about 30,000. Their job? Patrolling China’s world wide web to keep it safe: free of dangerous Western hatemongering, Tibet controversy, and (most importantly) the BBC. Their leaders? Well, aside from the ghost of Mao-Zedong, there are two high-profile commanding officers: Jingjing and Chacha (see left).
 
These two rambunctious, precocious wacky cartoon funsters were cooked up by officials in Shenzhen to educate the Chinese population as to “what is and is not legal to consult or write on the Internet”. Jingjing and Chacha (named for the Mandarin word for ‘police’, “jingcha”) each have their own websites, wherein web surfers can presumably trawl for the latest information on what things they’re not allowed to know about. That’s some adorable oppression of the masses.
Things looked sunny for the Internet in early 2000s Iran. It enjoyed a huge surge in web usage (around 7 million online), information was relatively free, and it was the last bastion for uncensored journalism in Tehran. And theeeennnn Ahmadinejad got into office. Since his election in 2005, old ‘dinejad’s regime has jailed and abused a whole heap of Iranian bloggers and online activists. People wishing to get online must first sign a waiver declaring that they will not look at “non-Islamic” websites during the course of their trawling.
 
The Internet itself is strictly filtered to deny access to sites such as IMDB.com (can’t have them reading about Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, can we?), Amazon.com (can’t have them stumbling across any book written in the last thousand years, can we?), and – strangely enough – Facebook.com (can’t have them finding out that John Lewis from Pennsylvania is feeling “kinda blue”, can we?). The filtering system used by Iran is the most extensive and draconian in the world, which obviously bodes well for Ahmadinejad’s international image which I shall charitably describe as presently “not fantastic”.
Growing up in North Korea means that your entire world is shaped by what Kim Jong-il thinks you should know. And stop waving around that humanities degree, saying that the media “controls us the same way in the West!” – if a person isn’t free to look up the starting credits to television smash Perfect Strangers on YouTube at his leisure, you’re talking a whole different level of control. And the control in North Korea runs deep – Internet users (all lucky four of them) are limited to a restricted intranet featuring a staggering thirty websites. Thirty. The country is an Internet “black hole”, with only a very few party elite enjoying access to the whole web – where I assume they spend all day on IMDB rating Team America: World Police zero stars.
 
As a bizarre footnote, Kim Jong-il himself doesn’t seem to be too concerned about censoring his own use of the Internet: he once asked then-US Secretary of State Madeline Albright for her email address, and has famously claimed that he met his current girlfriend online. Can you imagine the look of disappointment on her face when she turned up to that first ‘IRL’ date?