In today’s Information age, the battle by some goevernment to control content over radio, television and the most potent medium of all, the Internet, is a losing battle.
As the technical means and quantity of available devices to communicate increase, the overall amount of information stored and transmitted grows exponentially over time.
Not all that information is relevant and as the cost of storage and communication decrease, we tend to use the cheaper storage and bandwidth to keep and send information that has little value beyond our own sphere of influence.
The increase in available information, both useful and not, attracts more people to use and share information, contributing in the acceleration of the phenomenon.
There is however at least one area of technical expertise that cannot improve at the same rate as the overall expansion of information infrastructure: because there is a huge drive in making more bandwidth available to cope with the growing amount of users and their also growing needs for wider and faster communication channels(1), tools and techniques used for censorship will always be a step behind the mainstream, only hoping to catch on.
To adequately build a censorship infrastructure requires that all information be not just transported, but analysed for content as well. The computational requirement difference between the two systems is in the range of orders of magnitude: while simple communication equipment only have to understand extremely basic protocols for ensuring that travelling packets of data are not corrupted, censoring equipment must also reconstruct and analyse semantically, and within its context, the information contained in the transmission, and this must be done in almost-real time.
The cost of implementing these technical means of censorship is two-fold:
- monetary: analysing equipment is extremely more expensive than simple transmission equipment.
- quality: analysing systems slow down data going though them. In effect, they become the bottleneck of the whole communication infrastructure. Because all data has to pass through them, the use of censorship devices prevents the modernisation of the whole infrastructure and slows down its pace of growth. The result is that a country implementing a censorship programme cannot offer its businesses and citizen access to the information they increasingly need, resulting in a potential economic loss of performance and relevance in a world where competitors may have access to better communication infrastructure.
Ultimately, no censorship technique can be perfect, and the increasing openness of the world, its globalisation, render the control of information increasingly difficult. Physical borders fade away in a world were everyone is connected and one can know what’s on the other side of the fence.
Governments limiting access to information by slowing its growth or using censorship only hurt themselves in the long run: by disallowing their citizen to be part of a world where information is power, they in effect create a digital divide that in effects can only slow their economic performance and increase the discontent of the people.
It’s time that the focus of protecting ourselves be shifted from letting our governments do it for us through censorship to a more responsible, and more personal, way of tackling the issue. It is time our lords stop patronising us and let us grow up.
As Arthur C. Clarke said, We are now faced with the responsibility of discernment.
(1): if you doubt this, just imagine how much larger pictures produced by digital cameras have become over the past 5 years. People expect to be able to get videos, music, to share pictures all with increasing levels of quality over time. These activities require ever growing amounts of bandwidth. Companies too rely mostly on email as a means of exchanging information. People would initially use email as a replacement for faxes, for text information only, but now email is used to transmit documents, replacing snail mail altogether. The trend is electronic communication replacing all forms of paper based communication.
