INTERNET HAS PROLIFERATED AROUND THE WORLD, POSING DILEMMAS FOR GOVERNMENTS FLOW OF INFORMATION TO THEIR CITIZENS.

9:25 PM Apr 24, 1996

INTERNET HAS PROLIFERATED AROUND THE WORLD, POSING DILEMMAS FOR GOVERNMENTS FLOW OF INFORMATION TO THEIR CITIZENS.
The Net is reviled as a child molester, hailed as an avatar of democracy. And from Berlin to Beijing, from Paris to Singapore, everyone wants a piece of the action.

On Capitol Hill in Washington, right-wing members of Congress conjure images of children assaulted by online pornography and have passed a law imposing censorship of indecent computer communication.

Republican representative Henry Hyde tacked on a provision that forbids sending any information about abortion over computer networks. The resulting furore has united civil libertarians with the communications and computer industries in a campaign to have the restrictions declared unconstitutional.

A recently leaked report at the Pentagon reveals that the U.S. military views the Net as a source of cheap intelligence and a potential conduit for psychological operations and military communications. 'Information warfare' is emerging as a potential growth sector for military planners and contractors.

Rather than merely 'fitting in' to pre-existing social processes, the Internet is actually transforming the nature of the processes themselves, writes U.S. Department of Defence analyst Charles Swett.

Calling the Net a potentially lucrative source of intelligence useful to the department, he recommends that the Pentagon explore the Net as a medium for psychological operations and an offensive tool for unconventional warfare.

But as some countries scramble to impose their own ideas of order on the chaotic online universe, citizens are discovering ways to subvert controls.

Edward Wenk, science advisor to three U.S. presidents, credits communications innovations as a major factor in the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The Internet appears to be both riding and driving historical forces of globalisation.

French political theorist Jean-Marie Guehenno, in his recent book 'The End of the Nation-State', observes that the age of the networks, with its increased velocity and volume of information, is undermining existing nation-states and governments and bringing on a new imperial age that is at once unified and without a centre.

The Net, says Anthony Rutkowski of the Washington-based Internet Society, has an intrinsic leaning in the direction of greater freedom because of its highly distributed, bottom-up characteristics.

Because the Net is based on software standards rather than hardware technology, it can piggyback on any kind of local phone system. And as low-earth-orbit satellites offer the possibility of cheap telecommunications everywhere, Rutkowski sees national policies that have propped up the telecom monopolies and driven up access costs as the most significant impediment to the introduction of Internet services in developing countries.

The Internet's decentralised character was originally built into it by the U.S. military.

The U.S. Department of Defence created the network's ancestor, ARPANET, in the 1960s as a testbed for a flexible communications system that could withstand a nuclear war. Ironically, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's headquarters reportedly resorted to the Internet during the U.S.-led Gulf War when Iraq's own C3 communications system was destroyed.

But the Internet has only recently seeped into the consciousness of most governments.

In the People's Republic of China, the democracy movement's use of telecommunications following the 1989 Tiananmen massacre alerted the government to new threats to its control of information. The student movement, in particular, took advantage of Internet access through universities.

Chinese leaders are apparently aiming to use the Internet for international business while cracking down on political use of the network. Earlier this year, they ordered Internet users to register with the government. Then in March, they suspended new Internet accounts, claiming technical problems.

They're using 19th century modes of repression for 21st century ideology and it's not very successful, says Benjamin Barber, a U.S. political scientist. They negotiated with Rupert Murdoch's Sky Television, for example, to remove the BBC World Service. They left MTV on. Now, I think MTV is a much more dangerous and insidious coloniser of Chinese civilisation.

Singapore, too, has imposed tight restrictions on Internet users. The government decreed in March that Internet providers must censor material on sex, religion, and politics.

Information Minister George Yeo expressed concern about content that would have a public impact on public morals or the stability of Singapore.

In Germany, government efforts to censor computer communications began with neo-Nazi computer bulletin boards. But last December, German prosecutors tried to force the U.S.-based online service CompuServe to restrict access to sites they considered pornographic. After three months of censorship and criticism, CompuServe restored access to the sites but offered software allowing users to block materials they find offensive.

A CompuServe competitor, America Online, also had to backpedal after banning certain words from its network. One offender was breast. But protests by an angry discussion group of breast- cancer patients forced the service to rescind the policy.

The Internet can also be used to circumvent political censorship, as French citizens recently demonstrated. When a court banned publication of a controversial book on the late President Francois Mitterrand, an activist posted the entire text on his Internet site. Ten thousand copies were downloaded all over the world within a week.

Papal infallibility has also taken its lumps online. Following French Bishop Jacques Gaillot's high-profile support of homeless Parisians, Pope John Paul last year reassigned the Bishop to the Algerian diocese of Partenia, an unpopulated see in the Sahara Desert. Gaillot and his supporters turned the exile into a media event by setting up the first diocese on the World Wide Web -- the Internet sector that offers graphics, sound, and video.

Self-selected parishioners anywhere can see the Bishop's photo, read about him, and correspond with him electronically. (Confession and communion are not yet possible.) The New Yorker magazine recently quoted a letter to the Bishop that quipped: Better a real bishop in a virtual diocese than what we've got, a virtual bishop in a real diocese.

For serious political players from Nicaragua to Norway, an e-mail address and a home page on the World Wide Web are fast becoming essential.

Two years ago, the Zapatista rebels of southern Mexico establish a Web site. Many branches of the Mexican government are also online. And just clicks away from Bishop Gaillot's home page, the Vatican's Web site dispenses benedictions. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), too, offers the online world its 'Fact Book' of basic information on every country.

Serious financial players are going online as well. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently urged all nations to publish their economic data on the Internet to help prevent financial crises.