10:42AM
For Iran, soft-kill authoritarianism
Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 10:42AM Simple equation: the more we pursue policies that strengthen hard-liners, the more they will disconnect the masses from the outside world and thus the less our influence over Iran's evolution.POST: Iran limits ADSL bandwidth
ARTICLE: Iran bans fast internet to cut west's influence, Robert Tait, The Guardian, October 18, 2006
The rule: soft-kill authoritarianism with connectivity, but hard-kill totalitarianism with regime change--however achieved.
Thanks to Terry Collier and Jacob Heim for sending this in.
Reader Comments (4)
I hate to kill their joy but a text-only internet requires about 9600 to read at near full speed. If you're very fast, you can manage 14.4k but personally that used to give me a headache. Certainly, this will put a crimp on memes spread through audio or video but you can get plenty subversive with just text.
But then again, have they banned the load balancing router? If they have not, all they are doing is restricting the good stuff to those rich enough to get a load balancer.
If the Iranians are anything like the Iraqis they will be really upset at losing their porn.
Whereas the first US rebellion was over a whiskey tax!
People will revolt over the oddest things. The 1989 Romanian revolution started with an attempt to arrest a protestant minister.
It's the small cuts that hurt the worse.