In Iran, why didn’t they just turn Twitter off? From All Things Considered:
Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, says Iran uses a basic filtering architecture that has the average Internet connection piped through a government server farm before it goes anywhere else.
But, like resourceful American students in search of Facebook, many Iranians can get around blocks. Complicating matters for the authorities, Zittrain says, is the fact that social networking services like Twitter are decentralized.
In other words, many people use Twitter without visiting Twitter.com. Instead, they use any number of third-party services that have grown up around Twitter. So if the government blocks Twitter.com, the people using these alternatives don’t even realize there’s been a block.
It’s interesting to learn that our sanctions had some unintended consequences:
The Iranian opposition also has fewer options in its cat-and-mouse game with the censors because U.S. sanctions have kept some American companies from offering services like instant messaging in Iran. Still, persistent Internet users find the information they want; the only sure way to block them is to pull the plug on the whole Internet.
And Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says he doubts the Iranian government wants to do that.
“It’s like closing down an essential utility in order to control your populace,” O’Brien says. “And that’s not a decision you can take lightly.”
These days, the Internet is so integrated into industry, government — life itself — that even in Iran, shutting it down is the political equivalent of going nuclear.
A Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran from the TED Blog yesterday:
Which services have caused the greatest impact? Blogs? Facebook? Twitter?
It’s Twitter. One thing that Evan (Williams) and Biz (Stone) did absolutely right is that they made Twitter so simple and so open that it’s easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I’m sure it wasn’t conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it’s had global consequences. Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook’s model prevents. So far, despite a massive effort, the authorities have found no way to shut it down, and now there are literally thousands of people aorund the world who’ve made it their business to help keep it open.
Do you get a sense that it’s almost as if the world is figuring out live how to use Twitter in these circumstances? Some dissidents were using named accounts for a while, and there’s been a raging debate in the community about how best to help them.
Yes, there’s an enormous reckoning to be had about what works and what doesn’t. There have been disagreements over whether it was dangerous to use hashtags like #Iranelection, and there was a period in which people were openly tweeting the IP addresses of web proxies for people to switch to, not realizing that the authorities would soon shut these down. It’s incredibly messy, and the definitive rules of the game have yet to be written. So yes, we’re seeing the medium invent itself in real time.