A Thesis Submitted to Nazarbayev University School of Humanities and Social Sciences in Partial Fulfillment of Degree Requirements. Director of the MA Program in the School of Political Science and International Relations for Humanities and Social Sciences. Specifically, with the help of the Freedom on the Net score, which captures a level of internet freedom among 65 countries worldwide, a new set of data was collected to investigate whether non-work resources can explain rather empirical observations among non-democratic countries.
I am also very grateful to the entire faculty of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, namely Professor Caress Schenk and Professor Yoshiharu Kobayashi for everything they taught us, for their professional guidance and immense patience.
Introduction: Dictator’s Dilemma over the Internet Regulation
Democratic leaders tend to be more open in the area of the Internet, while leaders of autocracies face the so-called "dictator's dilemma", a dilemma when a leader wants to take advantage of the Internet (e.g. economically) without risking regime stability. Specifically, on the one hand, implementation and active development of ICT can positively reconstruct an economy, on the other hand, the Internet can be a powerful tool for opposition to set a population against regime elites and organize mass demonstrations. Given that a political leader seeks to stay in power as long as possible, the question of this paper is why some non-democracies allow more liberalized Internet regulation, while the Internet is heavily regulated in other non-democratic states.
Considering that all countries regulate the Internet, I would like to shed light on what factors explain the variation in the non-democratic mode of Internet regulation.
Literature Review and Theory: Resources Rents and Foreign Aid
Literature Review
- Regime Type and Internet Freedom
- Non-democratic Regimes and the Internet
All these models can be found in a mixed version either in democracy or non-democracy; But in the latter, the most frequent gateway model is when a government performs broad functions of the ISP and its regulator. By better understanding the political effects of the Internet, a leader therefore pursues a policy that positively favors his regime's survival. The author emphasizes that autocrats began to move toward a strategy called "positive control" of the Internet.
For example, Malaysia has introduced the so-called Bill of Guarantees (BoGs), which has a point of no censorship on the Internet to attract high-tech companies.
Theoretical Framework
A subset of the latter is the winning coalition (or simply the coalition) that keeps the leader in power. While public goods (e.g. civil liberties, peace, etc.) benefit all citizens, private ones (e.g. legal impunity) are distributed only among the members of the winning coalition. As coalition size increases, the provision of private benefits decreases, then the leader is expected to expand the allocation of public goods.
Labor-free7 resources, less supply of public goods, more restrictive Internet regulation (i.e. resource rents and foreign aid).
Statistical Analysis: Foreign Aid Promotes Internet Freedom
- Sample and Unit of Analysis
- Operationalization of Variables
- Statistical Model
- Findings
- Alternative explanation
In this section, I take a closer look at providing operational definitions of the dependent and independent variables. The theory used in this article is an extension of the selectorate model presented above. Last but not least, deficiencies in the given data used as a proxy for the outcome variable can significantly distort the results of the statistical analysis.
While the score may suffer from issues with subjective validation and/or resource limitation, Freedom House data is often used by scientists and Freedom on the net score is no exception. The “commutation” argument used in the theoretical part of the article assumes that foreign aid is equivalent to natural resource returns. Here ODA or simply foreign aid is provided by official agencies of the members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), by multilateral institutions and by non-DAC countries.
Demographic factors such as population size or electorate size can also influence Internet policy in a country. The choice of statistical model depends on the type of dependent variable and the relevant data set available. While the first two columns of Table 1 and Table 2 report the coefficient estimates for one of the independent variables (i.e. resources and aids respectively), columns 3 and 6 include all variables.
It appears that with a 1% increase in foreign aid as a share of GNI, the observed value of internet restriction decreases by approximately 3.2–3.3 points. In the graphs below, the author makes an attempt to describe the countries by estimating the impact of the value of non-labor resources on Internet freedom (both variables are averaged).
Case Studies: Internet As a Tool to Strengthen Control
Venezuela: Resource Curse as a Premise?
The country that emerged after the collapse of Gran Colombia, which is extremely dependent on revenues from natural resources, has experienced one of the sharpest declines in internet freedom in the past five years, along with Ukraine, Turkey, Russia and Ethiopia (Freedom On the Net 2016 n.d.) . Because a large part of the government's revenue comes from oil revenues, the oil price drop in 2014 worsened Venezuela's economic situation; in 2015 inflation was 275%. By analyzing the case of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, both the primary and secondary factors that led to the Internet freedom score drops are to be examined.
The launch of the Simon Bolivar satellite in 2008 from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province. Since its privatization, this ISP has been in possession of approximately 80% of the national Internet market (OpenNet Initiative Country Profile. Venezuela 2007). Nevertheless, since 2009, a number of approved decrees and other government decisions have contradicted the above ideas of the wide Internet access that is on the rise.
Undoubtedly, such government decisions were cause for concern for the future of Venezuela's Internet. Many critics asserted a claim that the government could completely usurp the power of the Internet for the sake of the ruling elite. The National Electoral Council's website was also taken down, leaving voters unable to track results.
A trend emerges that the widespread use and access to the Internet announced by the government ran up against the control of the latter. One of the ways to do this is to limit internet freedom, that is, by restricting access to the internet and prosecuting anti-government activists online.
Ethiopia: Heavy-Handed Approach to Internet
The increase in human rights violations in the media field can be traced back to 2005 after the parliamentary elections, when they were followed by a series of protests and arrests. In 2006 the government denied access to political publications on the Internet, one of which was the website blodpost.com (Internet Filtering in Ethiopia in. Exclusive control over the Internet is taken by the Ethiopian Telecommunications Agency (ETA).
In 2012, Eskinder Nega blogger was sentenced to 18 years after publishing an article questioning the implementation of the anti-terrorism law, including mass arrests (Ethiopian blogger Eskinder Nega was jailed for 18 years in 2012). In this way, the Ethiopian government bans any action deemed dissident and suppresses opposition voices. According to Human Rights Watch, Ethiopian security forces fatally injured hundreds of people and arrested and detained influential figures among the local population (“Such a Brutal Crackdown” 2016).
However, in 2016, bloggers such as Seyoum Teshome, who write about the Oromia protests, could be sentenced behind bars (Liberty Network Country Report. Ethiopia 2016). According to data provided by the World Bank, the indicator of 'net official development assistance (ODA) per capita' consists of "loan disbursements made on concessional terms (net of principal repayments) and grants from official agencies of Assistance members for Development. Committee (DAC), by multilateral institutions and by non-DAC countries to promote economic development and welfare in countries and territories on the DAC list of ODA beneficiaries. The Ethiopian government became suspected of 'buying' aid international from the US, UK and EU for the significant amount of political reforms, however without taking care of human rights, freedom and democratization (Feyissa 2011; Stremlau 2011).
The ruling elite represented by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front or the EPRDF government without exception ensures political survival by diminishing the ability of the mob to protest and revolt. Therefore, the Ethiopian government is implementing the more restrictive internet regulation policy to reduce the likelihood of being displaced.
Turkey: Instability as a Step to Regressive Approach to Online Freedom
The market is characterized by growth in internet penetration and a growing number of private internet service providers (ISPs). Turkey's goal to become part of the European Union was one of the driving forces behind the liberalization of the telecommunications and IT sectors. According to the OSCE report on media freedom in Turkey and internet censorship, the hands-off approach, without specific laws in regulating the internet, was replaced in the early 2000s.
When Internet access was on the rise in the early 2000s, many Internet cafe owners encountered problems with government control of their business. The legal development of the original Internet Law in 2014 was heavily criticized by activists and human rights defenders, raising serious concerns about Turkey's determination to join the EU. According to the latest Google Transparency report, requests from Turkish authorities to take down certain online content rose dramatically in 2013, then fell and rose again at the end of 2015 (Turkey - Government Takedown Requests - Transparency Report - Google n.d.).
Those arrested and charged were accused of bribery and fraud, among them were the sons of three ministers, and it is suspected that one of Erdogan's sons may also be in custody. Bulu's (2016) findings reveal that in the case of Turkey, Twitter was one of the resistant social media platforms that does not share any private information with the Turkish government and approves one-third of ban requests compared to Facebook's priorities. to serve the interests of Erdogan's government. Down last year, internet freedom in Turkey was rated 61 out of 100 for the first time, categorizing the country as "not free".
According to the Freedom on the Net report (Freedom on the Net Country Profile. Turkey 2016), network shutdowns, short-term social media blackouts and long sentences characterize the year 2016 due to criticism of the government, official email leaks, etc. It is likely , that Erdogan's regime is supported by the part of the population that admires the president's political figure.
Conclusion
Precisely because the internet is seen as a threat to political survival and during high levels of violence, in addition to restrictive regulatory mechanisms, dictators highly value the web's ability to protect their power. Report of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media on Turkey and Internet Censorship. Arab Spring| Social Media in the Egyptian Revolution: A Reexamination of Resource Mobilization Theory.” International Journal of Communication.
Aid Negotiation: The Uneasy 'Partnership' Between EPRDF and Donors.” Journal of East African Studies. Venezuela's Cyber Security Profile: Seeking Stability in an Unstable Medium. https://jsis.washington.edu/news/venezuela-cybersecurity-profile-seeking- stability-unstable-medium/#_edn35.
