The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was hailed around the world as the end of the Cold War, making it perhaps the most significant event of recent history. But 1989 held another event of immeasurable significance that would go almost unnoticed amid the twilight of Communism and the chaos that ensued: the invention of the World Wide Web that spring launched a quiet revolution, fundamentally reshaping the global flow of information and unleashing dramatic forces of change. Before long, ambitious social entrepreneurs driven by both profit and idealism would seize upon the new platform. Chief among these was Google, which evolved from a small university research project into the iconic giant of the Internet age.

In opening an unceasing flow of information into states whose governments thrive on isolation and the suppression of knowledge, Google has transformed the Internet into one of the most potent democratizing forces in the world. But its prominent place at the head of this information revolution is insufficient to make it a true global leader Instead, its size and scope means, paradoxically, that Google and Internet companies like it cannot truly lead liberalizing movements; as the most visible crusaders of the freedom of information, they are also the most easily censored by the authoritarian governments they challenge.

The Great Firewall
Of all the governments with an interest in restricting Internet freedoms, the People's Republic of China has been far and away the most successful. Its "Golden Shield Project" forms the world's most comprehensive and technically advanced barrier against online political and religious dissent. The barrier makes numerous potentially subversive websites inaccessible within Chinese borders through an Internet police task force of over 30,000, which censors inflammatory writings and reports chronic violators. The centerpiece of this project, the so-called "Great Firewall of China," harnesses the power of "chokepoints," the few major connections through which all Internet activity in the country must pass, to lock out information from the world outside.

Yet policing the chaos of the Internet is no small task. China in particular is "struggling to maintain a balance to exclude political material while keeping the Internet commercially useful," explained Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor Joseph Nye. To limit hard sanctions, therefore, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has relied on the soft power of threats and persuasion. Its propaganda arm maintains an undercover police force tasked explicitly with defending the Party agenda in online discussion forums. Prominent bloggers are bribed or harassed into silence. And citizens are closely monitored for dissident activity, including posting anti-government messages and attempting to visit banned websites, and searching controversial subjects.

Google, now 10 percent owned by the Chinese search engine Baidu, is among the scores of foreign and domestic Internet companies engaging in self-censorship to operate in China. Along with Yahoo!, AOL, Skype, and others, Google limits searches on its Chinese page, Google.cn. The site offers only government-approved websites for controversial topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre and the Three Gorges Dam project. However, Google’s concession pales in comparison with those of Yahoo!. After the Chinese government threatened to cut off the company's access to its rapidly growing Internet market, Yahoo! surrendered critical email records for two journalists, Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning. Both journalists were jailed and tortured on evidence of subversive activities proven through the documents Yahoo! released, a move that tainted the company's reputation in the United States but secured it a market of 150 million new users in China.

Jimmy Wales, founder of the non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia, told the HPR that Yahoo!'s response was "completely unacceptable." Yet while Yahoo!'s collusion surely disqualifies it from democratic leadership, Wikipedia's principles restrict its status as a leader as well, though in a subtler way. Wales explained that the freedom of information, knowledge, and speech are core to Wikipedia’s existence, and accordingly the company would never offer to cooperate with censorship of any kind. By refusing to cooperate, however, organizations like Wikipedia sacrifice much of their power to challenge authoritarian governments in the hearts and minds of their citizens. As of February 2008, Wikipedia remains completely blocked in China.

The True Leaders
Ironically, though the “Great Firewall” continues to lock out the biggest Internet companies and non-profits, it is substantially less effective at blocking smaller actors who utilize the Internet as a subversive tool. It is these individual activists, numbering in the thousands and armed with new technology the Internet revolution has spawned, who resemble democratizing forces more closely than Yahoo! and its peers. Piggybacking on Google's technology and spreading the gospel of Wikipedia, these individuals are challenging governments in ways that companies cannot. A prime is example is elgooG.com, a website that offers a horizontally mirrored but otherwise fully functional copy of Google. Though the site was created as a joke, it became famous in 2002 when Chinese citizens were able to use it to search the web when the CCP was full blocking Google. elgooG's example proves that subversives can succeed by being invisible, hacking technology and sneaking under the radar of governments in ways their more visible allies could not.

Perhaps the most vivid example of this bottom-up leadership comes from Bahrain. There, a growing number of Internet activists are using an unlikely tool to expose the inequities of Bahraini society: Google Earth. According to Mahmood Al-Yousif, a pioneer in the new class of Bahraini bloggers, "Through Google Earth, the whole world... can zoom in and have a good look at palaces and islands which a normal Bahraini wouldn’t even dream of one day coming close to, let alone stepping foot in." By redeploying Google's satellites for a wholly subversive purpose, this generation of Internet activists have suddenly made centuries of walls irrelevant, and the government finds itself in the curious position of trying to hide obscene wealth from impoverished citizens staring down from above.

It is these scrappy activists, using technology in ways its own creators cannot, who are leading the quiet charge to build a freer world. Invisible and unstoppable, they are challenging authoritarian governments with a decentralized revolution. As Wikipedia's Wales summarized, "as important as I think big websites are…we should also focus not so much on the leaders but upon the peer-to-peer nature of Internet communication, the ability for mass groups to quickly organize.” Such organization can produce revolutionary results, Wales continued, “where the people are able to come out in force, in large enough numbers that there's really not much to be done about it except to accept that there's going to have to be a change.]]>