One of the odder moments in Obama's speech in Cairo came when he suggested creating a new tool whereby young people in disparate parts of the world could talk to each other in real time:
...and create a new online network, so a young person in Kansas can communicate instantly with a young person in Cairo.
Word is that Obama will also create a magical flying machine, which can transport someone from the East Coast to the Middle East in just 15 hours, thereby facilitating cultural exchanges.
What Obama didn't address is the fact that the kid from Kansas better not broach any political subjects with his Cairo counterpart, if that young person happens to attend Cairo University:
Students who use the Internet as an outlet for their political or social views are on notice: One Cairo University student blogger was jailed for two months last summer for "public agitation," and another was kicked out of university housing for criticizing the government.
Kareem Amer, another Egyptian young person, was expelled from al-Azhar University (the other Egyptian university Obama praised in his speech), for criticizing the university's more conservative professors and saying the school curtailed free thought. He was later sentenced to four years in prison after a five-minute trial in 2007 for writing about politics and religion on his blog.
Some U.S. representatives sent a letter to Obama about Amer prior to his trip to Cairo, asking him to "strongly urge [Mubarak] to release" the "human-rights advocate and blogger."
That particular young person in Cairo will be impossible to "communicate" with over the Internet we already have or the new Internet Obama proposes to create because he remains in jail for "insulting Islam" and refusing to abandon his personal, "irreligious" views.
So, why do we need a new way to communicate with Egyptians when we've already got IM, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Why doesn't Obama simply encourage such communication on current platforms in one of his blockbuster speeches. I hear all the young people watch those speeches, and are already on the Twitter and such, poised to communicate "instantly" with their Middle-Eastern counterparts without the creation of a "new online network."
Obama is very unclear about what this line means, so we're left to guess, but his previous web projects offer some clues. An Obama-created network would end up being, at best, a vapid, fluffy photo-op of a venture that doesn't truly harness the free-wheeling power of the Internet for communication, but instead bottles it to serve Obama's message of the day. That has been the case so far with the much-hyped WhiteHouse.gov and Recovery.gov unveilings, which are long on pretty and short on useful. To an extent, this is to be expected from an administration managing its image, and is somewhat benign, but it poses more problems when you're talking about an administration diplomatic effort.
At worst, it seems an Obama-created "online network" for Americans to communicate with Muslims in the service of Obama's "kumbaya" message would be in danger of slipping into the same kind of censorship many Muslim cultures impose on online communications. Any restrictions would be under the guise of "not offending" Muslims, but would be read quite rightly as an endorsement of speech restrictions by the American president himself. Can you imagine, for instance, Obama allowing an "online network" in service of his goals that would let Americans to speak more bluntly about the subjugation of women in Muslim societies than he did in his speech?
One wonders if Abe Greenwald could "instantly communicate" these thoughts during a cultural exchange on the "new online network:"
Obama addressed women's rights before a Muslim audience by personally distancing himself from Westerners who criticize the hijab, offering a single sentence praising the economic advantages of an educated female population, celebrating the role of women in cherry-picked Muslim countries, and knocking the U.S. for its supposed failure to grant women full equality. This, in the same speech that saw Obama proclaiming, "We must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors."
How can Obama continue to recommend open discussion as a first step in bridging what he sees as the American-Muslim divide when he's too scared to note the bald fact of widespread female subjugation in the Arab world? How can he proclaim that America must lead by example and then deliberately degrade the example we are supposed to set?
Some argue that inequality for women is the most detrimental sociopolitical or economic feature of the larger Muslim world.
Obama constantly touts his desire to face inconvenient truths, ask tough questions, and say things that are hard to say, but wouldn't creating a "new online network" run by the U.S. government likely be yet another way to avoid such uncomfortable discussions?
On the other hand, this is Obama. The sentence could mean absolutely nothing, and he'll change his mind about his new Internet in 24 hours, anyway. The proposal struck me as more than a little odd.
It's also worth noting, from this week's Weekly Standard, another threat of free-speech limitations on the Internet that the Obama administration might embrace in its zeal to mend fences with allies:
In order to please our European allies and our Third World critics, the Obama administration may be tempted to surrender one particular manifestation of American "dominance": central management of key aspects of the Internet by the U.S. Department of Commerce...
Perhaps most serious, control of Internet names could become a lever to impose restrictions on Internet content. Many governments already attempt to control speech on the Internet. Some years ago, Yahoo! was subject to criminal proceedings in France for allowing Nazi memorabilia to be auctioned on its website. Britain, Canada, and Australia all have mandatory nationwide blacklists of banned sites, managed by nongovernmental regulators with minimal political oversight. Such blacklists can have unpredictable consequences: Wikipedia was badly degraded to British users for some hours because of a poorly designed censorship system targeting child pornography.
If we give control of the Internet naming infrastructure to an international organization, we must expect attempts to censor the Internet. The Organization of the Islamic Conference will doubtless demand the suppression of websites that "insult Islam" or "encourage hatred," and a number of European countries may well go along.
