In Iran, following a very public crackdown on the country’s green movement in 2009, Western technology companies like Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) sought to distance themselves from the regime. In their absence, the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei swept in and seized the opportunity to dominate the large (and state-controlled) Iranian mobile market. While its Western predecessors faced a backlash at home for selling products to the Iranian government that were used to track and suppress democracy activists, Huawei actively promoted its products in an authoritarian-friendly light. Its catalog was unapologetic, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal, with products like location-based tracking equipment for law enforcement (recently purchased by Iran’s largest mobile operator) and a censorship-friendly mobile news service. Huawei’s favorite domestic partner in Iran, Zaeim Electronic Industries Co., is also the favorite of government branches, including the Revolutionary Guards and the office of the president.
Officially, Huawei claims to offer Zaeim only “commercial public-use products and services,” but according to The Wall Street Journal, in off-the-record pitch meetings with Iranian officials, Huawei made clear its expertise in information censorship, mastered in China. (Huawei published a press release shortly after the story’s publication denying several of its assertions, and a month later stated that it would “voluntarily restrict” its business operations in Iran due to the “increasingly complex situation.”)
In response to these collaborations between autocratic countries, democratic states will want to build similar alliances and public-private partnerships to promote a more open Internet with greater political, economic and social freedom. One goal will be to contain the spread of highly restrictive filtering and monitoring technologies to countries with low but growing Internet penetration. This could manifest itself in many different strategies, including bilateral assistance packages with specific preconditions and making an open Internet a premier policy objective for a country’s ambassadors. There could also be transnational campaigns to change the international legal framework around free expression and open-source software. The shared, “bigger picture” goals of these states—access to information, freedom of expression, and transparency—would trump the minor policy or cultural differences between them, creating a kind of revived Hanseatic League of connectivity. The Hanseatic League wielded collective power across Northern Europe from the thirteenth century through the fifteenth through its economic alliances between adjacent city-states; its contemporary equivalent could be based on similar principles of mutual assistance but in a far larger, globalized version. No longer will alliances rely so heavily on geography; everything is equidistant in virtual space. If Uruguay and Benin find cause to work together, it will be easier to do so than ever before.
Part of defending freedom of information and expression in the future will entail a new element of military aid. Training will include technical assistance and infrastructural support in lieu of tanks and tear gas—though the latter will probably remain part of the arrangement. What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first. Indeed, traditional defense-industry leaders like Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are already working with the U.S. government to develop cyber-capacity. Weapons manufacturers, airplane builders and other parts of the military-industrial complex might not lessen—conventional militaries will always require guns, tanks and helicopters—but big military operations, already heavily privatized, will carve out space in their budgets for technical assistance.
Development assistance and foreign aid will take on a digital dimension too, buoyed by these new multilateral alliances. The trade of foreign assistance for future influence won’t change, but the components will. In a given developing country, one foreign power might be building roads, another investing in agriculture and a third building fiber networks and cell towers. In the digital age, modern technology becomes yet another tool for forging alliances with developing states; we shouldn’t underestimate how important technological competency will be for these countries and their governments. The push for foreign aid in the shape of fast networks, modern devices, and cheap and plentiful bandwidth may come from the population, pressuring the governments to agree to the necessary preconditions. Whatever the impetus, future states in the developing world will make a long-term bet on connectivity and align their diplomatic relationships accordingly.
New alliances will form around commercial interests as well, particularly copyright and intellectual-property issues. As commerce moves increasingly to the online world, the dynamics around copyright enforcement will lead to another layer of virtual alliances and adversaries. Most copyright and intellectual-property laws are still centered on the notion of physical goods, and there are divergent attitudes about whether theft or piracy of online goods (movies, music and other content) are equivalent to the theft of physical versions of those same items. In the future, states will begin to wade more deeply into legal battles over copyright and intellectual property because the health of their commercial sectors will be at stake.
There have been multiple international agreements dealing with copyright laws: the Berne Convention of 1886, which requires mutual recognition of the copyrights of other signatory states; the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights of 1994, which set the minimum standards for intellectual-property rights in World Trade Organization (WTO) states; and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty of 1996, which protects information-technology copyrights against infringement. The laws that govern copyright around the world are generally the same. But each country is responsible for enforcement within its borders, and not all countries are equally vigilant. Given the ease with which information crosses borders, people who pirate copyrighted material are typically able to find virtual safe havens in countries with less stringent regulation.
The great concern among intellectual-property watchers in the technology world is China. Because it is a signatory to the conventions above, technically it is bound to the same standards as other countries, including the United States. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in 2011, then Chinese president Hu Jintao privately told a small group of business leaders that China would “fully implement all of the intellectual property laws as required by the World Trade Organization and modern Western practices.” We attended this meeting, and as we filed out of the room after President Hu’s comments, the American business contingent clearly expressed skepticism toward his claim. And with good reason: It’s estimated that U.S. companies lost approximately $3.5 billion in 2009 alone because of pirated music recordings and software from China, and that 79 percent of all copyright-infringing goods seized in the United States were produced in China. Clearly, it’s not the absence of laws that contribute to this problem, but their lack of enforcement. Officially, it’s against Chinese law to produce counterfeit goods or to copy intellectual property for profit, but in practice, officials are discouraged from pursuing criminal prosecution of these crimes; violators are allowed to keep their profits. Moreover, the fines for violating the laws are too low and too irregularly issued to be effective in deterring such behavior, and corruption at local and regional levels encourages officials to turn the other way and ignore repeated violations.