I D É E S   F O R T E S    Issue 2.12 - December 1996

Slinging Singapore

By Matthew Doull



Forget AltaVista fodder; liberty-loving webmasters of the world should append the following short message to the bottom of every page they serve: "The Government of Singapore sucks." Why? Because those five words fall foul of the Singaporean censors' standards for political correctness, and they would be forced to prevent their poxy proxy servers from letting anyone in Singapore access any page that carried it. If Singapore won't let the whole of the Web in, the whole of the Web shouldn't let Singapore in - and there aren't enough censors in Singapore to cope with the concerted action of 100,000 or more webmasters. They would soon give up trying, but even if they somehow managed to block out every page there would be so little left for Singaporeans to look at on the Web that their stampede to use Malaysian dial-up ISPs to get around the technological dental dam would accelerate - like the network itself, Internet users route around censorship as though it were damage.

But why bother when the Singaporean experiment is doomed to failure anyway? Because the really important point about whether governments can restrict the free flow of information on the Internet has nothing to do with dirty pictures and everything to do with power. It's time to send a message to governments about where power now lies. The spread of information freedom enhances the spread of political freedom and economic freedom - because information, money and power are the same thing. And the Internet distributes them better than any mechanism ever devised . In other words, free your Internet and your ass will follow.

Matthew Doull is president of Hollinger Digital, the bits-not-atoms division of a large newspaper company.