Living in a Despot’s Walled Garden

February 14, 2011

By Stephen Minas

Of course, all of this means that what North Korea is creating isn’t the web in any recognizable form. Instead, what the regime is essentially doing is building a walled garden app.

On the World Wide Web, content is stored on billions of interlinked web pages. But in walled garden apps, content is controlled by the creator—self-contained and often unlinked. Thus, the BBC News app for the iPhone features news only from the BBC. The ridiculously popular ‘Angry Birds’ app contains exactly what its name suggests and little else.

In an article in August titled ‘The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet,’ Wired Editor Chris Anderson examined the ‘move from the wide-open Web to semi-closed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.’ It’s driven, says Anderson, by changing preferences and changing technology: The appeal of exploring the web has given way to the convenience of ‘dedicated platforms.’ An increasing proportion of people are accessing the Internet through handheld devices (mainly smart phones, but also tablets like the iPad), which have smaller screens better suited to individual apps than to browsers.

Not everyone welcomes the trend toward walled garden apps. Internet entrepreneur Steven Johnson recently complained: ‘this year, for the first time in my adult life, unlinkable information began growing at a meaningful clip.' But it’s a trend driven by a familiar trade-off: consumers want convenience and value certain brands; producers want better revenue models than the web generally affords.

But a walled garden state of the kind envisaged by the North Korean ‘roadmap’ would be a totalitarian mirror image of self-contained apps. There would be no equivalent trade-off between government and citizen. Internet users subject to ‘mosquito net’ filtering would be completely cut off from what Anderson calls the ‘wide-open Web of peer production, the so-called generative web where everyone is free to create what they want.’

So why go to the trouble of building a walled garden? North Korea’s government, say the researchers, ‘has largely adopted a “reactive” attitude toward the Internet as a potential political threat.’ It’s suspicious of both domestic dissent (online ‘samizdata’) and foreign meddling (as it would doubtless see ‘21^st century statecraft’ practised by the US State Department).

Needless to say, North Korea is an extreme case, while Egypt’s emergency blackout is a path open to virtually any regime facing ‘difficulties.’ But the Egypt example also demonstrates that autocrats who deny their people access to inconvenient content outside the bounds of a walled garden will still face resistance.

The response to Egypt’s Internet blackout was immediate and self-organising, starting when Shervin Pishevar, a technology entrepreneur based in California, posted a message on Twitter: ‘I need volunteers to help build mobile ad hoc mesh networking hidden in backpacks/cars/rooftops powered by satellite that can't be blocked.’

Thus began an international effort to get ‘mesh network’ software into Egypt, to allow individual laptops to communicate with each other. The goal, Pishevar told The Daily Beast, was ‘a kind of secondary Internet, one that would not be blockable.’ Google also launched an Egypt-specific workaround to let people post Twitter messages by phone.

Pishevar says he now wants to take the ‘mesh network’ technology to ‘any country where there is dictatorship…My dream is that in my lifetime we can get rid of dictatorships.’

This is the new ‘freedom agenda’ facing architects of walled garden states: not the policy of any particular government, but the realm of activists, engineers and entrepreneurs converging to form coalitions of the willing.

Walled garden apps might well represent the future of a predominantly handheld Internet, but no one would want to actually live in one. Attempts to create walled garden states—virtual carve-outs from an interdependent international society—seem unambiguously to represent a throwback to the past.