What VPNs tell us about democracy and human rights
Vladimir Putin has approved two laws banning the use of proxy servers and virtual private networks (VPN) in Russia, following the example of China, which has announced it will be blocking them from February next year, requiring operators and app stores to prevent their use.
Apple has already been strongly criticized for capitulating to the Chinese authorities and removing more than 60 tools that thousands of private users and businesses use daily to access pages that China’s Great Firewall would otherwise block, often on the basis of arbitrary criteria or administrative errors.
These types of restrictive measures are beginning to separate the world into two halves: those where governments recognize the right of people to access information freely and without being monitored or spied on, and those that do not, by prohibiting tools to ensure the privacy of a connection, believing that the state has the right to spy on people.
A VPN is a multifunctional, general-purpose tool: many of its users, including me, use them simply to ensure the security of a connection when they are in a shared network, or for academic use. Obviously, a VPN can also be used for many other things, but just as a knife can be used to cut bread or kill someone. Prohibiting VPNs is not a way of protecting the population by preventing alleged terrorist activity, but a way of making sure that it is a bit more difficult to escape government monitoring.
China’s censorship system has allowed its government to build the internet it wants by preventing its people accessing services in other countries, which in turn were imitated by local competitors that complied with the norms imposed by their government and that could have allowed them to become the available alternative. Controlling access to the internet has enabled the Asian giant to create the largest online market in the world, with more than 700 million users, accounting for 21% of the world’s connected population, and with tools built entirely from models it saw worked in other countries, following a model of micro-innovation.
The strategy has worked very well: China is now an internet power with internal development tools with huge user bases that are very competitive, such as WeChat, and that allow the government to maintain its levels of population surveillance and even contributing, unwittingly, to the invention of new languages. But it is clear that this supposed advantage has been built by restricting individual freedoms in a way that is completely incompatible with respect for human rights or democratic principles.
Undemocratic regimes like China or Russia are struggling to close any possible loopholes that might allow their populations to escape their control, with VPNs becoming the second-to-last escape route, while others such as North Korea, have reduced the internet to 28 web sites, to which only a privileged few have access.
For giants like China or Russia, internet censorship has allowed them to generate local champions along with access to the comforts of a reasonably modern life without the disadvantages of people succumbing to influences that could challenge them, a model that has been dubbed the splinternet.
We now live in a world subject to minimal human rights and minimum standards of democracy, where at worst we see periodic attempts to block pornography, hate speech or related elements, all of them subject to public discussion, pitted against another that directly and consciously ignores those human rights and democracy and uses internet control as a strategy to obtain comparative advantages and to perpetuate itself in power. If you want to know which side of the world you live in, try installing and using a VPN. There’s no doubt about it: George Orwell was a true visionary.
(En español, aquí)
