Part 3 (1/2)

Improvements to the printing press led to lower costs and the proliferation of printers looking for material to publish. Entry barriers were very low, both for obtaining the printed works of others and for contributing one's own thoughts. Soon the demand for knowledge led to modern works-from Cervantes and Shakespeare to journals and then newspapers. Ideas that found resonance with large numbers of people attracted a larger audience still-in the manner of a Google search today.

In the Age of Enlightenment that ensued, knowledge and reason became a source of political power that rivaled wealth and force of arms. The possibility of self-governance within a framework of representative democracy was itself an outgrowth of this new public square created within the information ecosystem of the printing press. Individuals with the freedom to read and communicate with others could make decisions collectively and shape their own destiny.

At the beginning of January in 1776, Thomas Paine-who had migrated from England to Philadelphia with no money, no family connections, and no source of influence other than an ability to express himself clearly in the printed word-published Common Sense, the pamphlet that helped to ignite the American War of Independence that July. The theory of modern free market capitalism, codified by Adam Smith in the same year, operated according to the same underlying principles. Individuals with free access to information about markets could freely choose to buy or sell-and the aggregate of all their decisions would const.i.tute an ”invisible hand” to allocate resources, balance supply with demand, and set prices at an optimal level to maximize economic efficiency. It is fitting that the first volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was also published in the same year. Its runaway popularity was a counterpoint to the prevailing exhilaration about the future. The old order was truly gone; those of the present generation were busy making the world new again, with new ways of thinking and new inst.i.tutions shaped by the print revolution.

It should not surprise us, then, that the Digital Revolution, which is sweeping the world much faster and more powerfully than the Print Revolution did in its time, is ushering in with it another wave of new societal, cultural, political, and commercial patterns that are beginning to make our world new yet again. As dramatic as the changes wrought by the Print Revolution were (and as were those wrought earlier by the introduction of complex speech, writing, and phonetic alphabets), none of these previous waves of change remotely compares with what we are now beginning to experience as a result of today's emergent combination of nearly ubiquitous computing and access to the Internet. Computers have been roughly doubling in processing power (per dollar spent) every eighteen to twenty-four months for the last half-century. This remarkable pattern-which follows Moore's Law-has continued in spite of periodic predictions that it would soon run its course. Though some experts believe that Moore's Law may now finally be expiring over the next decade, others believe that new advances such as quantum computing will lead to continued rapid increases in computing power.

Our societies, culture, politics, commerce, educational systems, ways of relating to one another-and our ways of thinking-are all being profoundly reorganized with the emergence of the Global Mind and the growth of digital information at exponential rates. The annual production and storage of digital data by companies and individuals is 60,000 times more than the total amount of information contained in the Library of Congress. By 2011, the amount of information created and replicated had grown by a factor of nine in just five years. (The amount of digital storage capacity did not surpa.s.s a.n.a.log storage until 2002, but within only five years the percentage of information stored digitally grew to 94 percent of all stored information.) Two years earlier, the volume of data transmitted from mobile devices had already exceeded the total volume of all voice data transmitted. Not coincidentally, from 2003 to 2010, the average telephone call grew shorter by almost half, from three minutes to one minute and forty-seven seconds.

The number of people worldwide connected to the Internet doubled between 2005 and 2010 and in 2012 reached 2.4 billion users globally. By 2015, there will be as many mobile devices as there are people in the world. The number of mobile-only Internet users is expected to increase 56-fold over the next five years. Aggregate information flow using smartphones is projected to increase 47-fold over the same period. Smartphones already have captured more than half of the mobile phone market in the United States and many other developed countries.

But this is not just a phenomenon in wealthy countries. Although computers and tablets are still more concentrated in advanced nations, the reduction in the cost of computing power and the proliferation of smaller, more mobile computing devices is spreading access to the Global Mind throughout the world. More than 5 billion of the 7 billion people in the world now have access to mobile phones. In 2012, there were 1.1 billion active smartphone users worldwide-still under one fifth of the global market. While smartphones capable of connecting to the Internet are still priced beyond the reach of the majority of people in developing countries, the same relentless cost reductions that have characterized the digital age since its inception are now driving the migration of smart features and Internet connectivity into affordable versions of low-end smartphones that will soon be nearly ubiquitous.

Already, the perceived value of being able to connect to the Internet has led to the labeling of Internet access as a new ”human right” in a United Nations report. Nicholas Negroponte has led one of two competing global initiatives to provide an inexpensive ($100 to $140) computer or tablet to every child in the world who does not have one. This effort to close the ”information gap” also follows a pattern that began in wealthy countries. For example, the United States dealt with concerns in the 1990s about a gap between ”information haves” and ”information have-nots” by pa.s.sing a new law that subsidized the connection of every school and library to the Internet.

The behavioral changes driven by the digital revolution in developed countries also have at least some predictive value for the changes now in store for the world as a whole. According to a survey by Ericsson, 40 percent of smartphone owners connect to the Internet immediately upon awakening-even before they get out of bed. And that kick-starts a behavioral pattern that extends throughout their waking hours. While they are driving to work in the morning, for example, they encounter one of the new hazards to public health and safety: the use of mobile communications devices by people who email, text, play games, and talk on the phone while simultaneously trying to operate their cars and trucks.

In one extreme example of this phenomenon, a commercial airliner flew ninety minutes past its scheduled destination because both the pilot and copilot were absorbed with their personal laptops in the c.o.c.kpit, oblivious as more than twelve air traffic controllers in three different cities tried to get their attention-and as the Strategic Air Command readied fighter jets to intercept the plane-before the distracted pilots finally disengaged from their computers.

The popularity of the iPhone and the amount of time people communicate over its videoconferencing feature, FaceTime, has caused a few to actually modify the appearance of their faces in order to adapt to the new technology. Plastic surgeon Robert K. Sigal reported that ”patients come in with their iPhones and show me how they look on FaceTime. The angle at which the phone is held, with the caller looking downward into the camera, really captures any heaviness, fullness and sagging of the face and neck. People say, 'I never knew I looked like that! I need to do something!' I've started calling it the 'FaceTime Facelift' effect. And we've developed procedures to specifically address it.”

THE RISE OF ”BIG DATA”

Just as we have extended our consciousness into the Global Mind, we are now extending our peripheral nervous system into the Internet of Things, which operates almost entirely below the level of consciousness and controls functions important to maintaining the efficiency of Earth Inc. It is this part of the global Internet that is proliferating most rapidly, generating far more data than people themselves produce, and evolving toward what some call the ”Internet of Everything.”

The emerging field labeled ”Big Data,” one of the exciting new frontiers of information science, is based on the development of new algorithms for supercomputers to sift through voluminous new quant.i.ties of data that have not previously been seen as manageable. More than 90 percent of the information collected by Landsat satellites has been sent directly to electronic storage without ever firing a single neuron in a human brain, and without being processed by computers for patterns and meaning. This and other troves of unutilized data may now finally be a.n.a.lyzed.

Similarly, most of the data now being collected during the operation of industrial processes by embedded systems, sensors, and tiny devices such as actuators has been disposed of soon after it is collected. With the plummeting cost of data storage and the growing sophistication of Big Data, some of this information is now being kept and a.n.a.lyzed and is already producing a flood of insights that promote efficiency in industry and business. To take another example, some commercial vehicles mount a small video camera on the winds.h.i.+eld that collects data continuously but only saves twenty seconds at a time; in the event of an accident, the information collected during the seconds prior to and during the accident is saved for a.n.a.lysis. The same is true of black boxes on airplanes and most security cameras in buildings. The data collected is constantly erased to make room for newer information. Soon, most all of this information will be kept, stored, and processed by Big Data algorithms for useful insights.

Plans for gathering-and a.n.a.lyzing-even larger amounts of information are now under way throughout the world. IBM is working with the Netherlands Inst.i.tute of Radio Astronomy to develop a new generation of computer technology to store and process the data soon to be captured by the Square Kilometre Array, a new radio telescope that will collect each day twice the amount of information presently generated on the entire World Wide Web.

Virtually all human endeavors that routinely produce large amounts of data will soon be profoundly affected by the use of Big Data techniques. To put it another way, just as psychologists and philosophers search for deeper meanings in the operations of the human subconscious, cutting-edge supercomputers are now divining meaningful patterns in the enormous volumes of data collected on a continuous basis not only on the Internet of Things but also by a.n.a.lyzing patterns in the flood of information exchanged among people-including in the billions of messages posted each day on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

The U.S. Geological Survey has established a Twitter Earthquake Detector to gather information on the impact and location of shaking events more quickly, particularly in populated areas with few seismic instruments. And in 2009, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon launched the Global Pulse program to a.n.a.lyze digital communications in order to detect and understand economic and social shocks more quickly. The pattern with which people add money to their mobile phone accounts is an early warning of job loss. Online food prices can be surveyed to help predict price spikes and food shortages. Searches for terms like ”flu” and ”cholera” can give warnings of disease outbreaks.

The intelligence community is using the techniques of Big Data a.n.a.lysis to search for patterns in vast flows of communication to predict social unrest in countries and regions of particular interest. Some new businesses are now using similar techniques to a.n.a.lyze millions of messages or tweets in order to predict how well Hollywood-and Bollywood-movies will perform at the box office.

DEMOCRACY IN THE BALANCE.

As always, the imperatives driving commerce and national security adapt quickly to the emergence of new technologies, but what about democracy in this new age? The rapid and relentless rise of Internet-based communication is surely a hopeful sign for the renewed health of self-governance, largely because the structural characteristics of the Internet are so similar to the world of the printing press: individuals have extremely low entry barriers and ever easier access. As was true in the age of the printing press, the quality of ideas conveyed over the Internet can be at least partially a.s.sessed by the number of people with whom they resonate. And as more people find resonance with particular expressions, more still have their attention directed to the expressions whose popularity is rising.

The demand for content on the Internet is also linked to a significant rise in reading-a faint echo of the ”big bang” of literacy that accompanied the creation of the Gutenberg Galaxy. In fact, after reading declined following the introduction of television, it has now tripled in just the last thirty years because the overwhelmingly dominant content on the Internet is printed words.

With democracy having fallen on hard times due to the current dominance over the public interest in so many countries by wealth and corporate power-and in others by the entrenched power of authoritarian dictators.h.i.+ps-many supporters of democratic self-governance are placing their hopes on the revival of robust democratic discourse in the age of the Internet.

Already, revolutionary political movements-from the Tahrir Square protesters in Cairo to Los Indignados in Spain to Occupy Wall Street to the surprisingly ma.s.sive crowds of election protesters in Moscow-are predominantly shaped by the Internet. Facebook and Twitter have played a particularly important role in several of these movements, along with email, texting, and instant messaging. Google Earth has also been significant in spotlighting the excesses of elites, in Bahrain for example-and in the Libyan revolution, Google Earth was actually used by rebels in Misrata to guide their mortars. (Google Earth also, by the way, triggered a small border dispute and brief armed standoff between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, when it mistakenly attributed a tiny portion of Costa Rica to the national territory of Nicaragua.) Thus far, however, reformist and revolutionary movements that have begun on the Internet have mostly followed the same pattern: enervation and excitement followed by disappointment and stasis. It is still an open question whether these Internet-inspired reform movements will gain a second wind and, after a period of simmering, reemerge and ultimately reach their goals.

One of the first revolutionary movements in which the Internet played a key igniting role was the 2007 Saffron Revolution in Myanmar. Activists took extreme personal risks to spread their messages urging democratic reforms by using the World Wide Web with false names from Internet cafes and by smuggling thumb drives across the border to collaborators in the diaspora living in Thailand. Unfortunately, the authoritarian government in Myanmar was able to smother and shut down the Saffron Revolution, but only at the cost of completely blacking out the Internet inside the country's borders.

Nevertheless, the revolutionary fires lit before the Internet was shut down continued to smolder in Myanmar and continued to burn brightly in other parts of the world where the forces of conscience had been awakened to the abuses and injustices of the Myanmar dictators.h.i.+p. (Diasporas, particularly educated and wealthy diasporas in Western countries, have been newly empowered by the Internet to play significant roles in fostering and sustaining reform movements in their countries of origin.) A few years later, the government of Myanmar was pressured to loosen its controls on political dialogue and release the leader of the reform movement, Aung San Suu Kyi, from her long house arrest, and in March 2012 she was triumphantly elected to the Parliament amidst many signs that the popular movement that had begun on the Internet was reemerging as a force for change that seemed destined to take control of the government.

In many other authoritarian countries, however, the ferocious resistance to reform has been more effective in snuffing out Internet-based dissent movements. In 2009, Iran's Green Revolution began as a popular protest against the fraudulent presidential election. Although Western sympathizers had the impression that Twitter played a key role in igniting and sustaining the protest movement, in actuality social media played a much smaller role inside than outside Iran because the Iranian government was successful in largely controlling Internet use by the protesters. While it is true that YouTube videos doc.u.mented government excesses (most famously, the tragic death of Neda Agha-Soltan), the more potent social media sites that would have enabled dissenters to build a larger protest movement were almost completely shut down. Indeed, during the election campaign itself, when the princ.i.p.al opposition candidate, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, began to gain momentum by organizing on Facebook, the government simply blacked it out.

Worse still, the Iranian security forces gave the world a demonstration of what a malignant authoritarian government can do to its citizens by using the knowledge it gains from their Internet connections and social graphs to identify and track down dissenters, read their private communications, and effectively stifle any effective resistance to the dictators.h.i.+p's authority. The entire episode was a chilling alarm that underscored the extent to which the lack of privacy on the Internet can potentially increase the power of government over the governed more easily than it can empower reform and revolution.

China, in particular, has introduced by far the most sophisticated measures to censor content on the Internet and exercise control over its potential for fostering reformist or revolutionary fervor. The ”Great Firewall of China” is the largest effort at Internet control in the world today. (Iran and the retro-Stalinist dictators.h.i.+p of Belarus are the other two countries that have attempted such efforts.) China's connection to the global Internet is monopolized by state-run operators that carefully follow a system of protocols that effectively turn the Internet within China into a national intranet. In 2010, even an interview with the then premier of China, Wen Jiabao, in which he advocated reforms, was censored and made unavailable to the people of China.

In 2006 the Chinese plan to control content on the Internet collided with the open values of the world's largest search engine, Google. As one who partic.i.p.ated in the company's deliberations at the time, I saw firsthand how limited the options were. After searching for ways to reconcile its commitment to full openness of information with China's determined effort to block any and all content it found objectionable, Google made the principled decision to withdraw from China and instead route its site through Hong Kong, which still maintains a higher level of freedom, albeit within constraints imposed from Beijing. Facebook, by the way, has never been allowed into China. The cofounder of Google, Sergey Brin, said in 2012 that China had been far more effective in controlling the Internet than he had expected. ”I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle,” Brin noted, ”but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle.”

The much admired Chinese artist Ai Weiwei expressed a different view: ”[China] can't live with the consequences of that.... It's hopeless to try to control the Internet.” China now has the largest number of Internet users of any country in the world-more than 500 million people, 40 percent of its total population. As a result, most observers believe it is only a matter of time before more open debate-even on topics controversial in the eyes of the Communist Party-will become uncontrollable inside China. Already, a number of Chinese leaders have found it necessary to take to the Internet themselves in order to respond to public controversies. In neighboring Russia, former president Dmitri Medvedev also felt the pressure to engage personally on the Internet.

As the role played by the Internet and connected computing devices becomes more prominent and pervasive generally, authoritarian governments may find it increasingly difficult to exert the same degree of control. When the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, it was partly due to the fact that four out of every ten Tunisians were connected to the Internet, with almost 20 percent of them on Facebook (80 percent of the Facebook users were under the age of thirty).

So even though Tunisia was one of the countries cited by Reporters Without Borders as censoring political dissent on the Internet, the largely nonviolent revolution gained momentum with startling speed, and the pervasive access to the Internet within Tunisia made it difficult for the government to control the digital blossoming of public defiance. The man who set himself on fire in protest, Mohamed Bouazizi, was not the first to do so, but he was the first to be video-recorded doing so. It was the downloaded video that ignited the Arab Spring.

In Saudi Arabia, Twitter has facilitated public criticism of the government, and even of the royal family. As the number of tweets grew faster there in 2012 than in any other country, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer, Faisal Abdullah, told The New York Times, ”Twitter for us is like a parliament, but not the kind of parliament that exists in this region. It's a true parliament, where people from all political sides meet and talk freely.”

But experts in the region argue that it is important to look carefully at the interplay between the Internet and other significant factors in the Arab Spring-including some that were at least as important as the Internet in bringing about this sociopolitical explosion. The combination of population growth, the growing percentage of young people, economic stagnation, and rising food prices created the conditions for unrest. When governments in the region first promised economic and political reforms, then appeared to backtrack, the frustrations reached a boiling point.

The change that many a.n.a.lysts believe was most important in sowing the seeds of the Arab Spring was the introduction in 1996 of the feisty and relatively independent satellite television channel Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera was soon followed by approximately 700 other satellite television channels that were easily accessed with small, cheap satellite dishes-even in countries where they are technically illegal. Several governments attempted to control the proliferation of small dishes, but the result was an incredible outburst of political discussion, including on topics that had not been debated openly before. By the time the Arab Spring erupted in Cairo's Tahrir Square, both access to satellite television and the Internet had spread throughout Egypt and the region. Sociologists and political scientists have had a difficult time parsing the relative influence of these two new electronic media in causing and feeding the Arab Spring, but most believe that Al Jazeera and its many siblings were the more important factor. In 2004, when then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak paid a visit to Al Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar, he said, ”All that trouble from this little matchbox?” Perhaps both were necessary but neither was sufficient.

Like Tunisia, Egypt found it difficult to shut down access to the Internet in the way Myanmar and Iran had. By 2011 it was so pervasive that when the government blocked all of the Internet access points entering the country, the public's reaction was so strong that the fires of revolt grew even hotter. The determination of the protesters ultimately succeeded in forcing Mubarak to step down, but their cohesion faded during the political struggle that followed.

Some a.n.a.lysts, including Malcolm Gladwell, have argued that online connections are inherently weak and often temporary because they do not support the stronger relations.h.i.+ps formed when ma.s.s movements rely upon in-person gatherings. In Egypt, for example, the crowds of Tahrir Square actually represented a tiny fraction of Egypt's huge population-and those in the rest of the country who sympathized with their complaints against the Mubarak government did not remain aligned with the protesters when the time came to form a new political consensus around what kind of government would follow Mubarak. The Egyptian military soon a.s.serted its control of the government, and in the elections that followed, Islamist forces prevailed in establis.h.i.+ng a new regime based on principles far different from those advocated by most of the Internet-inspired reformers who predominated in Tahrir Square.

Indeed, not only in Egypt but also in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere-including Iran-the same pattern has unfolded: an emergent reform movement powered by a new collective political consciousness born on the Internet has stimulated change, but failed to consolidate its victory. The forces of counterrevolution have tightened control of the media and have reestablished their dominance.

The unique history of communications technology in the Middle East and North Africa offers one of the reasons for the failure by reformers to consolidate their gains. The emergent political consciousness that accompanied the Print Revolution in Europe, and later North America, bypa.s.sed the Middle East and North Africa when the Ottoman Empire banned the printing press for Arabic-speaking peoples. This contributed to the isolation of the Ottoman-ruled lands from the rapid advances (such as the Scientific Revolution) that the printing press triggered in Europe. Two centuries later, when Arab Muslims first asked the historic question ”What went wrong?” part of the answer was that they had deprived themselves of the fruits of the Print Revolution.

As a result, the inst.i.tutions that emerged in the West to embody representative democracy never formed in the Middle East. Centuries later, therefore, the new political consciousness born on the Internet could not easily be embodied in formal structures that could govern according to the principles articulated by the reformers. Yet the forces of authoritarianism could easily embody their desire to control society and the economy in the inst.i.tutions that were already present-including the military, the national police, and the bureaucracies of autocratic rule.

Other a.n.a.lysts have connected the disappointment in the wake of Tahrir Square to what they regard as yet another example of ”techno-optimism,” in which an exciting new technology is endowed with unrealistic hopes, while overlooking the simple fact that all technologies can be used for good or ill, depending on how they are used and who uses them to greatest effect. The Internet can be used not only by reformers, but also by opponents of reform. Still, the exciting promise of Internet-based reform-both in the delivery of public goods and, more crucially, in the revitalization of democracy-continues to inspire advocates of freedom, precisely because it enables and fosters the emergence of a new collective political consciousness within which individuals can absorb political ideas, contribute their own, and partic.i.p.ate in a rapidly evolving political dialogue.

This optimism is further fueled by the fact that some governments providing services to individuals are making dramatic improvements in their ability to communicate important information on the Internet and engage in genuinely productive two-way communication with citizens. Some nations-most notably, Estonia-have even experimented with Internet voting in elections and referenda. In neighboring Latvia, two laws have already been pa.s.sed as a result of proposals placed by citizens on a government website open to suggestions from the public. Any idea attaining the support of 10,000 people or more goes directly into a legislative process. In addition, many cities are using computerized statistics and sophisticated visual displays to more accurately target the use of resources and achieve higher levels of quality in the services they deliver. Some activists promoting Internet-based forms of democracy, including NYU professor Clay s.h.i.+rky, have proposed imaginative ways to use open source programming to link citizens together in productive dialogues and arguments about issues and legislation.

In Western countries, however, the potential for Internet-based reform movements has been blunted. Even in the United States, in spite of the prevailing hopes that the Internet will eventually reinvigorate democracy, it has thus far failed to do so. In order to understand why, it is important to a.n.a.lyze the emerging impact of the Internet on political consciousness in the broader context of the historic relations.h.i.+p between communications media and governance-with particular attention to the displacement of print media by the powerful ma.s.s medium of television.

In the politics of many countries-including the United States-we find ourselves temporarily stuck in a surprisingly slow transition from the age of television to the age of the Internet. Television is still by far and away the dominant communications medium in the modern world. More people even watch Internet videos on television screens than on computer screens. Eventually, bandwidth limitations on high-quality video will become less of a hindrance and television will, in the words of novelist William Gibson, ”be appropriated into the realm of the digital.” But until it does, broadcast, cable, and satellite television will continue to dominate the public square. As a result, both candidates and leaders of reform movements will continue to face the requirement of paying a king's ransom for the privilege of communicating effectively with the ma.s.s public.

Well before the Internet and computer revolution was launched, the introduction of electronic media had already begun transforming the world that had been shaped by the printing press. In a single generation, television displaced print as the dominant form of ma.s.s communication. Even now, while the Internet is still in its early days, Americans spend more time watching television than in any other activity besides sleeping and working. The average American now watches television more than five hours per day. Largely as a result, the average candidate for Congress spends 80 percent of his or her campaign money on thirty-second television advertising.

To understand the implications for democracy that flow from the continuing dominance of television, consider the significant differences between the information ecosystem of the printing press and the information ecosystem of television. First of all, access to the virtual public square that emerged in the wake of the print revolution was extremely cheap; Thomas Paine could walk out of his front door in Philadelphia and easily find several low-cost print shops.

Access to the public square shaped by television, though, is extremely expensive. The small group of corporations that serve as gatekeepers controlling access to the ma.s.s television audience is now more consolidated than ever before and continues to charge exorbitant sums for that access. If a modern-day Thomas Paine walked to the nearest television station and attempted to broadcast a televised version of Common Sense, he would be laughed off the premises if he could not pay a small fortune. By contrast, paid pundits whose views reflect the political philosophy of the corporations that own most networks are given many hours each week to promulgate their ideology.

So long as commercial television dominates political discussion, candidates will find it necessary to solicit large and ever growing sums of money from wealthy individuals, corporations, and special interests to gain access to the only public square that matters when the majority of voters spend the majority of their free time staring at television screens. This requirement, in turn, has led to the obscene dominance of decision making in American democracy by these same wealthy contributors-especially corporate lobbies. Because recent Supreme Court decisions-especially the Citizens United case-have overturned long-standing prohibitions against the use of corporate funds to support candidates, this destructive trend is likely to get much worse before it gets better. It is, in a very real sense, a slow-motion corporate coup d'etat that threatens to destroy the integrity and functioning of American democracy.

Although the political systems and legal regimes of countries vary widely, the relative roles of television and the Internet are surprisingly similar. It is notable that in both China and Russia, television is much more tightly controlled than the Internet. In the Potemkin democracy that has been constructed in Vladimir Putin's Russia, the government is choosing to tolerate a much freer, more robust freedom of speech on the Internet than on television. Mikhail Kasyanov, one of the prime ministers who served under Putin (and whose candidacy for president against Putin's handpicked successor, Dmitri Medvedev, was derailed when Putin ordered him removed from the ballot), told me that when he was prime minister under Putin he was given clear instructions that debate on the Internet mattered little so long as the government exercised tight control over what appeared on Russian television.