How Ideologies Impact Web Structure
http://qz.com/780675/how-do-internet-censorship-and-surveillance-actually-work/
The internet seems to be a nebulous entity: uncategorizable, wild, and purely connective by it’s nature; however, this is not always the case as the structure of the internet varies from country to country and by ideology to ideology. As such, the internet’s nature and the freedom users experience online is tied directly to the structure of the internet: a topic we have covered in class. For example, as discussed in the article, in January of 2011 President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt ordered the country’s Internet be shut down after noticing that protesters had been using social media platforms to rally and organize protests. The ease with which he was able to restrict the countries access to the internet -within minutes and a few phone calls- raised questions about just how free the internet actually was. Researchers at Harvard attempted to answer this question, by analyzing the structure of the internet in various countries around the world, categorizing them into four levels of risk for internet disconnection: severe, significant, low and resistant.
The researchers found that countries with democracies and more freely competitive markets were more likely to have resistant structures. This was because the flow of online traffic had more options to pass through, and therefore it became more difficult to find “choke points” from which to spy, censor, or sever connection to the outer web altogether. In general, a local web is structured by ISPs (Internet Service Providers), which direct individual users through a network, ultimately connecting users via an AS (Autonomous System) to the world wide network. By contrast, countries like Egypt and China had fewer ISPs and so the diversity of ASs, that are critical to internet connectivity, was significantly less than countries with competitive markets; in fact, Egypt has only two major ASs. Therefore, it is significantly easier for governments of such countries to restrict, and censor users of the internet, leading to situations like that in Egypt and China’s Great Firewall.
In conclusion, while internet structure is a critical tool in analyzing, searching, and understanding the web it also plays a key role in understanding the ideologies that formed a country. This sociological aspect, I think, ties beautifully into the overarching theme of this course: to synthesize multiple fields of study into a cohesive and hopefully accurate model of the world.
Sonnad, Nikhil. “How Countries like China and Russia Are Able to Control the Internet.” Quartz. N.p., 05 Oct. 2016. Web. 11 Oct. 2016.