Debunking The Internet Myth

29/09/2020 Debunking the Internet Myth: Technological Prophecies and Middle East Politics :: Middle East Quarterly
Debunking the Internet Myth

Technological Prophecies and Middle East Politics
by Alon Peled
Middle East Quarterly
September 2000, pp. 41-54
https://www.meforum.org/71/debunking-the-internet-myth
An impressive array of analysts are predicting that Internet-based technologies

will change Middle Eastern politics.
Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times asserts that Middle Easterners
today are by-passing government surveillance via the free ow of Internet
information. Citing as evidence anecdotal stories about his meetings with
various Internet-savvy individuals, he argues that a "silent invasion" of
information is taking place in the Middle East and that, unlike previous
invasions, "there will be no cease- re" for this one.1 Charles Maynes argues that
the Internet is replacing traditional Middle East policies of stealth and
repression with transparency and liberalization.2 In a similar vein, Kemal Dervis
and Nemat Sha k highlight the Internet as a key factor in the region's
development, whether positive or negative. If things go wrong, Middle East
governments will fail to block Internet access and a large number of their
citizens will become frustrated after using the Internet to discover the true
nature of their regimes. If things go right, the Internet will grow to become an
important part of a blossoming new Middle East economy.3
Others observers concur. Jon Alterman of the United States Institute of Peace
argues that "the Arab world has joined in the global enthusiasm for the
Internet." He proposes that Internet web pages and e-mail messages that travel
anonymously or with encryption over international telephone lines "are
confounding old-fashioned censors and posing new challenges to regimes"
across the Middle East.4 He can restrain his excitement over these new
developments mainly because of the relatively small number of Middle
Easterners who have discovered the Internet, as well as obstacles to its
acceptance. Nonetheless he declares: "the Internet holds out the promise of
allowing Arabs to dip into a vast sea of information that currently lies beyond
their grasp."5 Ingrid Volkmer proposes several models in which a new Internet-
based regional network can contribute to prosperity in the region. The
Internet is also portrayed as a tool to combat radical protest groups, to jump
start the stagnating economies of the Middle East, to facilitate cooperation
https://www.meforum.org/71/debunking-the-internet-myth 1/20
among scholars and journalists across borders, and to join Arabs and Jews to
promote common regional goals.6 Anticipating all these Internet gains,
Clement Henry called on foreign aid organizations such as USAID to invest
heavily in promoting Internet technologies in the Middle East.7
And on it goes. But what evidence supports such projections and what
rationale underlies such policies? How valid are the arguments that the
Internet will produce these many bene ts?8
By way of an answer to these general questions, we identify nine widely

accepted statements that together constitute what might be called the
Internet dream, then examine the evidence to test for their validity.
Geographic Scope
Our geographic scope in this analysis is the Levant: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan,
Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority. There are three reasons for this narrow
focus. First, the Arab states in this circle seem to constitute a technological-
economic sphere. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) of the Persian Gulf exhibits
phenomenal Internet growth, but there are few signs that this growth is
trickling into other Arab countries.9 Hence, it is meaningless to average the
Internet use in Syria and Dubai just because people in the two countries speak
Arabic.
Secondly, the Levantine countries share a reasonably homogeneous

international situation in that all of them depend on an Arab-Israeli peace to
achieve more political stability and to pave the way to increased international
investment. They all expect to reap economic bene ts from the shift from war
to peace.
Thirdly, leaders of Israel's neighbors have voiced fears about Israeli "economic
and technological colonialism." That, in turn, introduces a unique factor into
projections of Internet growth: the gap between Israel and its neighbors in
terms of information and communications technologies (ICT) at a time when
these technologies are widely perceived to be the economic engine of the
future. In fact, by February 1998, The Syrian regime mouthpiece Tishrin
published an Internet survey that "clearly demonstrated" that Israeli and Jewish
organizations have colonized "100 percent" of the Internet and that there are
no materials on the Internet that are "benign to Syrian interests."10 Hence, the
Arabs' frustration over their prolonged technological backwardness and their
political fear of Israeli economic domination could slow down Internet growth
in the region as a whole, and plans for inter-state regional Internet projects
that are initiated or sponsored by Israel might even encounter opposition from
neighboring countries. It is therefore interesting to examine the Internet
growth in the Levantine Arab states without factoring in the quite different
situation in Israel.
I. The Political Dream
The Internet strengthens civil society. Anderson proposes that the Internet
extends the informal structure of Middle East countries, where citizens rely
mostly on information gathered via social networks of trust and mutual
obligations.11 The Internet is seen as expanding and strengthening the
foundations of civil society in the Levantine Arab states. A stronger civil society,
in turn, has the bene t of leading to a more ef cient, responsive, and less
corrupt regimes.
A growing body of evidence suggests, however, that the Internet is eroding,

rather than extending, social networks of trust and mutual obligations. For
example, based on the largest online commercial survey of Internet users to
date (one involving 18,000 people), David Green eld de ned 6 percent of all
Internet users as "addicted" and an additional 10 percent of all web surfers as
"abusers;" These people, Green eld argued, have become so obsessed with the
Web that they have begun destroying their real-life relationships at home,
work, and school.12 Similarly, Norman Nie of the Stanford Institute for
Quantitative Study of Society and Lutz Erbring of the Free University of Berlin
recently surveyed 4,113 people, asking them about the Internet's impact on
activities ranging from their daily routines to their social relationships. The
results of this survey, they argued, show that the more time people spend
online, the more socially isolated from real people, family members, and
society at large they become.13
There is little reason to believe that Middle East web surfers will behave
differently than their American counterparts. In fact, the power of the Internet
to isolate individuals and fragment communities is especially strong in
traditional regions such as the Middle East where swelling numbers of young
people are discovering through it the long-forbidden, narcissistic, Western
cultural "fruits" of pornography and rap music.14 Arab youngsters are likely to
immerse themselves in the new materials that were unavailable to them before,
at the expense of nurturing social and communal relationships that are key to
the emergence of a strong civic society which can challenge the power of the
state. The potential of the Internet to degrade social networks of trust and
mutual obligations is as strong as its potential to contribute to the free ow of

information.
The Internet will democratize centralized regimes. According to George Gilder,

new information technologies
will blow apart all the monopolies, hierarchies, pyramids, and power
grids of established industrial society. It will undermine all
totalitarian regimes. Police states cannot endure under the advance
of the computer because it increases the power of the people far
faster that the powers of surveillance.15
In the Middle East, Anderson argues, residents will circumvent the data
provided by state authorities, reach out to new global information sources, and
transcend familial, political, professional, economic, and international
boundaries.16 For example, Edward Said writes that his ideas penetrated the
mainstream media of the Middle East only after they were rst published on
the Internet.17 Friedman believes that the new communications technologies—
including the Internet—render inevitable a transparent, democratic,
decentralized, and market-based society. Technology makes globalization
inevitable and irreversible. The Internet, he maintains, extends the ow of free
information from mobile phones and satellite televisions in a way that
authoritative government can no longer control.18 Friedman's logic suggests
that the Internet will cause the centralized regimes of the Middle East to
collapse.
But, as Ithiel de Sola Pool has argued, government policies determine if

computer technologies become "technologies of freedom."19 Governments can
effectively curb, supervise, or channel residents' Internet activities. They can
prohibit the commercial use of the Internet, as the Syrian government does.20
They can create extensive new Internet-censorship laws as Tunisia has done.
Such laws send a strong message early on to the society that the Internet is no
different from other aspects of life, including modern media, tightly controlled
by the government. Eric Goldstein, who compiled the comprehensive Human
Rights Watch survey on the impact of the Internet on free expression and
censorship, writes about Tunisia:
Without exception, the Tunisians we interviewed said they believed

the government monitored e-mail correspondence. None of them
could cite concrete evidence for this, but said they made this
assumption because of the level of police surveillance of telephone

conversations and other aspects of Tunisian life.21
Governments can extend existing Draconian press and publication laws to

cover Internet communications, as Jordan did with its Press and Publication
Law, which took effect on September 1, 1998. The Jordanian law neither
explicitly prohibited access to international sites nor did it restrict Jordanians
from publishing on the web. However, the law was phrased deliberately in a
broad and ambiguous way to permit the courts to apply it virtually to anything
Jordanians publish (on or off line). For example, Article 5 of the law prohibits
individuals from publishing "anything that con icts with the principles of
freedom, national responsibility, human rights and values of the Arab and
Islamic nation." Article 37 requires Jordanians to refrain from publishing any
materials containing content deemed objectionable, including material that
"disparages the King and the Royal family... infringes on the judiciary or
undermines its independence... [and that] encourages perversion or leads to
moral corruption."22 Although the Jordanian minister of information, Nasir
Juda, vowed the government would pursue a "soft implementation" of the law,
Alterman correctly argues that such soft implementation "could swiftly turn
draconian at the government's whim."23
Governments can also curb Internet activities by deploying and supervising the
physical network lines that connect neighborhoods and homes. For example,
the Singaporean government bans households from installing direct satellite
broadcast dishes. At the same time, the government has invested heavily in
connecting every household to a new state-owned ultra-fast ber optic data
network. Poh-Kam Wong who studied the history of national information
infrastructure (NII) initiatives in Singapore concluded that such
communications infrastructure decisions were made at "the highest political
level." The Singaporean government, it appears, believes it can "exert greater
control over programming piped through cable television channels than
programming sent via satellite broadcast."24
Governments can also employ powerful surveillance techniques to monitor

what their citizens are doing online—by installing equipment in telecom rms
to monitor telephone and data communications, by deploying systems to
intercept satellite-telecommunications traf c, and by using the unique
identi cation numbers of personal computers to track the online activities of
citizens. In Jordan, intelligence services summoned at least two persons for
questioning over messages with political content that they posted on bulletin
boards or chat rooms.25 In Saudi Arabia, all Internet connections and the
server communications of about forty Internet service provider (ISP)
companies are routed through a national hub. This hub is comprised of high-
speed computers that block access to thousands of sites catalogued on a
rapidly expanding blacklist to insure the integrity of the country's puritan-like
Wahhabi tradition. In fact, the Saudis twice postponed awarding commercial
ISP licenses in order to ensure that their state-owned company, King Abdulaziz
City for Science and Technology (KACST), had a fully functioning central
ltering system that could censor "material that would affect the religious and
moral ethics of the country." The Saudis have also developed an elaborate
"censorware" toolkit to control what citizens do online. As a result, Saudi users
who request a site that is blocked get a message on their screens warning that
all access attempts are logged.26
The Saudi example illustrates that Friedman was correct in predicting that
countries cannot escape the "forward march of technology," but, at the same
time, he was wrong in predicting that governments will no longer control the
ow of information in our new high tech environment.27 Even Alterman who, in
general remains upbeat about the prospects of the Internet eroding censorship
in the Middle East recognizes this:
With an ability to search stored messages and Internet traf c for key
words or speci c strings of characters, governments can monitor
the Internet even more ef ciently and effectively than they can
other media.28
In addition to exercising surveillance, governments can discourage

international calls to foreign ISPs by raising the cost of these calls. In Jordan,
for example, a monthly account for a moderate Internet user costs the
equivalent of $70, including phone charges—well above the reach of middle-
class citizens. The Jordanian government collects taxes and fees directly from
the commercial ISPs and these levies are ultimately paid by Jordanian web
surfers. It is therefore not surprising that the community of web surfers in
Jordan is small (between 20,000 and 30,000 people) and that, of all web surfers
in the Arab world, Jordanians are the most dissatis ed with their ISP services.
In fact, it is even relatively expensive to surf the Web in an Internet cafe in the
Levant ($4 per hour in Cairo, about $6.50 per hour in Kuwait, and about $7 per
hour in Ramallah).29 The combination of high cost and user dissatisfaction
discourages others, who then opt to remain off-line. Moreover, governments
can develop Internet contents in native languages, thus ensuring that the
English-illiterate masses are restricted to utilizing these resources; that is what

the Chinese government has done by developing Mandarin Internet
contents.30 Far from being a force for democratization, the Internet can be co-
opted to support the existing power structure.
The Internet will create new opportunities for inter-state cooperation.

Traditional economic resources such as oil are scarce, depletable, and bene t
the few; information is abundant and can be shared by all. Hence, proponents
of this thesis further argue, as Middle East national economies become more
information-centered, there will be more opportunities for cooperation.31
Speci cally, there would be exciting opportunities for genuine inter-state
cooperation in the burgeoning new eld of building new virtual information
and communication networks.
Alas, information does not exist without physical infrastructures, such as

telecommunications networks. And, in the Middle East, most
telecommunications providers are, for all practical purposes, monopolies that
rely on high tariffs, high minimum fees, and limited usage to secure their
monopoly. True, one nds some telecommunication competition in Israel,
Egypt, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority; and the national Jordanian
Telecom Company has very recently become a private company. Nonetheless,
the formerly state-owned telecommunication companies are still signi cantly
better connected to the state bureaucracy than their new and weak
competitors, and they dominate the local telecommunication markets.32 Naomi
Collett reviewed and compared the privatization of telecom services in Jordan,
Egypt, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia's with similar processes elsewhere in the
world. Sadly, she concluded that:
So far, Middle East governments have only very cautiously dipped their
collective toes into the privatization process, and even fewer have show any
willingness to end the state's monopoly over telecom services.33
Several Middle East states (most notably Egypt, Israel, and Jordan) have
attempted to deregulate telecommunications services more vigorously. But
deregulation threatens the former local telecommunication monopolies
because large multinational corporations such as AT&T can step in and bite
deeply into their revenues. Fears of such competition dominated the behavior
of Egyptian bureaucrats who mounted an impressive opposition to hosting the
Middle East Economic Summit in Egypt in 1996.34 In addition, more ef cient
telecommunications providers from neighboring countries can win public
tenders to provide new types of cellular, satellite-based, Internet, and cable
communications. To protect themselves from tough foreign competition, the

former national telecommunications monopolies will once again raise the
banners of "national security." After all, would the Syrian government permit
Bezek, Israel's national telecommunications provider, to install new digital
switchboards? Will Israel outsource the maintenance of its telephone lines to a
Jordanian company because the latter charges less?
International telecommunications companies will also suffer from this "national

security" paranoia. For example, Arafat recently granted two virtually identical
"exclusive" rights to two competing American and European telecom providers
to establish communications infrastructure in Gaza. Arafat has been using such
dubious management techniques frequently in other domains as well (for
example, he has several intelligence organizations supervising each other) as a
means to tighten his grip on Palestinian society in the name of national
security.35 Or, to give another example, when callback services were rst
introduced in Egypt, the government blamed them for abetting terrorists by
allowing them to keep in touch while bypassing local exchanges (and the state
security apparatus). Likewise, Saudi Arabia has banned callback services
altogether. In light of these examples, it is easy to understand why, in 1997,
Israel and Turkey were the only Middle East countries that signed the 69-
nation World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement to open up the
telecommunications sector worldwide.36 The Middle East has a long way to go
before its states can overcome mutual suspicion and deregulate sensitive
domains such as computers and data networks. In the absence of such
deregulation, the structures of national Middle East economies will continue to
resemble a zero-sum game, albeit one played by penniless gamblers
determined not to reform their ways.
II. The Economic Dream
With time, all Middle Eastern states will bene t economically from the Internet.
Anderson says that Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon will follow the
trailblazing Internet path of the Persian Gulf emirates that quickly created up-
to-date infrastructures.37 Indeed, some data supports this argument. Jordan,
for example, vowed to adopt an Internet model in the future for its National
Information Systems in order to give all citizens access to the information
available to government employees. Commercial Internet service providers are
proliferating all over the Middle East, with ve in Jordan at the end of 1997,
eleven in Lebanon, and thirty-two in Egypt.
Yet, overall the Levant remains one of the most under-represented areas of the
world in terms of per capita Internet connectivity.38 Of cial data also points to
Internet use in the Arab Levant states growing at a slower pace than in other
regions. Currently the Internet is still largely a toy for most Levantine surfers,
rather than a productive business tool. The governments of the Levant do not
offer online services for citizens; the businesses of the Levant do not develop
ef cient business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) Internet
channels; and, overall, local Internet research and development is almost non-
existent.39
The Middle East bene ts from the advantage of its backwardness. Backward
states can advance rapidly in new economic domains because they can deploy
relatively advanced technology without having to traverse the costly
intermediary steps that the economically advanced countries passed through.
For example, poor countries can deploy mobile telephone networks rather than
the more expensive cable-based networks. In the same way, Middle Eastern
states can place their Internet contents on data servers in the West, so
Western investors and clients can speedily access the data without having to
travel through the low-bandwidth communications pipes and networks of the
Middle East. In professional computer literature this technique is known as
"mirroring." It permits governments and businesses in low-bandwidth
countries to copy every night their World Wide Web (WWW) data to a
powerful Internet server located in a high-bandwidth country (such as the
United States) and to direct customers to this server. Investors and customers
will not know that, in fact, they are accessing "Levant web materials" located,
for example, on a web server in Boston.
Trouble is, the Internet revolution is progressing at a breathtaking pace and the
Levant states are still lacking the critical mass of regular Internet users that
fuel the demand for more sophisticated and up-to-date Internet services. So
long as the Internet remains a toy for the elite, the Arab states in the Levant are
likely to miss the next Internet revolution. Put differently, a country is doomed
to remain hopelessly at the bottom of the emerging new global information
economy if it always plays "catch up" with yesterday's Internet technologies.
Take the burgeoning e-commerce revolution: only a handful of companies in
the Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East employ the Internet for
business. Hence, entrepreneurs and investors are discouraged from developing
Arab e-commerce Internet hubs. At a recent telecommunications conference
in Beirut, participants heard stern warnings that Arabs will be left outside of
the global e-commerce economy because currently only 0.11 percent of all the
Arab population have access to the Internet and only 5 percent of all Arab
households have a telephone line; hence, no one in the Arab world has an
economic incentive to develop Arab e-commerce solutions.40
A vicious circle has developed: poor communications infrastructure and high

connectivity prices result in modest demand for Internet services, and modest
demand in turn does not generate enough public pressure to improve the
communications infrastructure and to lower the cost of connecting to the
Internet. This vicious circle causes the Arab countries of the Middle East to
miss the economic bene ts of the Internet revolution. The so-called
"advantage of backwardness" can help only those countries that nd ways to
break such vicious circles and bootstrap themselves into the information age.
Will the Levant governments understand that by banning "culturally perverted"
sites (including pornography sites) and by maintaining high Internet
connection costs they are, in effect, sti ing the public demand for better and
faster Internet infrastructure? Will they loosen up their attitudes towards the
Internet to generate the public demand that is key to any future economic
gains from the Internet?
The poor Arab countries of the Middle East also nd that it is getting harder to
bene t from information technology because it eviscerates existing jobs and
requires highly skilled technical manpower that they lack. Some economists—
citing the clash between the relentless application of jobs-destroying
technologies and the surge of world population in these poor countries to
unprecedented levels—depict a grim technological future in which poor
countries will fare even worse than they did a century ago.41 The deepening
cleavage between the few new high-tech rich and the rest of the society in
Israel is a case in point. Members of the Israeli parliament (Knesset)
enthusiastically embraced the Internet as a mechanism to increase economic
equality in the society when they published their rst comprehensive report on
this topic in 1997. However, only three years later, Knesset members displayed
much less enthusiasm, and their debates began focusing on the large groups of
destitute Israelis that were left on the waste lines of the Internet revolution.42
Similarly, the Economist dedicated a good portion of its recent "Government
and the Internet" survey to the emerging new "digital divide" between the
"haves" and the "have-nots" of the information age.43 Hence, only a handful of
technically skilled people bene t from the new "information economy" while
the vast majorities of the Levant's citizens struggle to survive as exempli ed by
the stark differences between the economic fortune of the residents of the
new gated golf course communities and the masses who live in tombs in the
City of the Dead in Cairo.44
Thus, in the Internet age, most Middle Eastern states are likely to remain
economically backward while a few of them may sink further to the bottom of
the global economic ladder. The contrast with Israel here is once again
illuminating. As with Arab teenagers, many Israeli youngsters develop
familiarity with the PC, e-mail, the Internet, and the Web outside school while
seeking new forms of pleasure and excitement. But the Israeli private sector's
technological power is due above all to the fact that the country has the most
technically educated population in the world with 135 engineers for every
10,000 people in the workforce (the United States is second with 70 engineers
per 10,000 employees).45 Even if American engineers are better educated and
more experienced than their colleagues, the immigrant Russian in Israel, those
latter have enormously boosted the Israeli economy.46 In stark contrast, the
number of graduates of tertiary education in Lebanon and Syria has actually
declined between 1980 and 1996. Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon ranked at the
bottom of the global scale between 1985 and 1995 in the number of research
and development scientists, engineers, and technicians.47
Most future economic prosperity, Friedman argues, will stem from "hot zones"
where "people—for reasons of culture, history or sheer DNA—are just naturally
agile, and they have gotten even faster as their governments have provided
them with the basics and then just gotten out of the way." Examples of such hot
zones include northern Italy, Tel Aviv, Shanghai, South Korea, and Bangalore,
India.48 With the possible exception of Beirut, none of these "hot zones" is
located in the Arab states of the Levant, and the governments of these
countries are doing all too little to nurture the human infrastructure and
political environments within which such zones evolve and expand.
The Internet will help narrow the economic gap between Israel and its neighbors.
The Internet provides cheap new opportunities to educate the masses in the
Levant, to build new and more productive businesses, and to lower the costs of
providing state service to millions of people. Dervis and Sha k, in their "good
neighborhood" tale, describe how Middle Eastern countries can harness the
Internet to improve the education of the masses and, by doing so, begin closing
their productivity, prosperity, and con dence gaps vis-à-vis more advanced
countries (such as Israel).49
But a closer examination reveals that the communications gap between Israel
and its neighbors remains very large and may be increasing. Scholars divide the
use of various communications media into four groups. Uni-directional
communications are various types of electronic broadcasting where the
individual is a passive recipient of information (e.g., television). Bi-directional
communication refers to types of media where two parties are engaged in an
exchange of information (e.g., the telephone). Productivity communications are
means commonly used to enhance business productivity (e.g., cellular
telephones and fax machines). Lastly, multi-directional communications are
information technology tools that permit the individual to engage many
individuals in an exchange of information (e.g., computers and Internet
connections).50 Figure 1.0 compares the gures on Israel to the aggregated
numbers of its neighbors in order to examine the telecommunications gap in
the Middle East:
Thus, at the end of 1997, the Arab states of the Middle East led over Israel in the
use of uni-directional communications but were behind Israel in the use of all
other types of communications. World Bank data suggests that while the bi-
directional communications gap between Israel and its neighbors shrank
between 1996 and 1997, the multi-directional gap widened. The multi-
directional communication gap between Israel and its neighbors was the most
signi cant. Israel had nearly four times the number of personal computers
(PCs) and thirty-three times the number of Internet hosts per 1,000 people
than its neighbors combined at the end of 1997 (A host is commonly de ned as
one computer with a domain name and an Internet Protocol (IP) address
connected to the Internet). Moreover, the volume of Internet activity in the
Arab Middle East was miniscule because Internet use is largely con ned to the
business elite, and, at the end of 1997, Israel had more than ten times as many
Internet sites as its neighbors.51
Using the of cial statistical reports produced by the Internet Software

Consortium (ISC), gure 2.0 shows the widening Internet gap between Israel
and all of its neighbors combined:
These explains why Arab Internet data sources such as Internet Arab World
(IAW) and Dabbagh Information Technology (DIT), the leading publisher of the
Arabic and Middle East editions of PC-Magazine, compare only data about
Internet use among Arab countries; they rarely compare the growth of Internet
activities in Arab countries with that of Israel, Western countries, or even other
less developed countries.52 The Arab countries of the Middle East are also
uninvolved in critical future developments of the Internet technology. For
example, Israel alone in the Middle East is af liated with the Internet-2
initiative of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development
(UCAID). Hence, investments in Internet technologies are most advantageous
to countries such as Israel where a signi cant portion of the society is
technically skilled, where schools invest greatly in technological education, and
where the Internet is already part of the daily routine for larger segments of
the society.
III. The Cultural Dream
The Internet offers an opportunity to strengthen core cultural values. Jon

Anderson argues that the Middle East could place a "distinctively Middle
Eastern mark" on the Internet.53 According to Anderson, individuals who strive
to strengthen the core values of their societies will nd each other through the
web, jointly generate websites that are devoted to these values, and use the
new medium to recruit, involve, and bind together others who feel the same
way. To be sure, Arab and Muslim Internet contents have proliferated in recent
years. Many Middle East WWW sites celebrate the use of the Arabic script and
language online. Iranian and Saudi authorities and seminaries are engaged in
several projects to place authoritative versions of the Qur'an and other
religious texts in Arabic on the World Wide Web.54
All true, but Western content dominates the Internet. After all, if the Internet
becomes popular in the Middle East, where will Arabic-speaking youth surf?
Will they settle for browsing Muslim canonical content, or, alternatively, will
they visit popular pornography Internet sites? Is it not therefore more
reasonable to argue that Muslim religious leaders will tend to view the Internet
as a threat to religious values rather than as an opportunity to spread them?
There are already indications that they are growing wary of the impact of the
Internet on their communities. For example, a spokesman for the Syrian
Computer Society (whose chairman, Bashshar al-Asad, is now the Syrian
president) justi ed Syria's "go-slow" attitude towards the Internet by saying,
Our problem is... we are a traditional society, and we have to know if

there is something that cannot t with our society. We have to make
it safe. We want to have Internet with a minimum of problems, so the
solution was to go by stages.55
Clearly, in the Arab countries of the Levant, religious leaders are more
concerned about the danger of the Internet corrupting young minds than its
potential to bind together youngsters around traditional core values.
IV. The Technological Dream
Regional Internet networks are easy and cheap to build owing to the plummeting
cost of hardware and software. Countries must cooperate in three areas to
establish an Internet-based regional network: physical infrastructure, network
and application protocols, and netiquette (i.e., rules and norms of behavior
regarding the use of the network). According to this thesis, effective regional
networks are mainly dependent on data storage capacity and transmission
speed, the cost of which is rapidly declining. Indeed, the past three decades
have witnessed the cost-effectiveness ratio of computer storage capacity
improve by a factor of 10,000 as computer discs became standardized, smaller,
stronger, and faster. Similarly, average network speeds have grown by 60
percent a year since the early 1960s.56 Hence, Middle Eastern countries can
install cheap high-speed networks and powerful data servers and quickly
deploy effective regional networks based on the TCP/IP Internet standard.
But, paradoxically, the incredible speed and enormous storage capacity of data
networks exacerbate the problem of agreeing upon and enforcing inter-state
norms of network behavior. Consider the problem of data encryption.
Governments increasingly mobilize the strength and speed of computers to
wiretap and analyze the network activities in other countries. For more than a
decade, U.S. organizations such as Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility have failed to circumvent such activities carried out by the
National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's
National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Though NSA's ability to intercept
communications worldwide has declined, it still retains an impressive
capability to intercept and decode "every modern type of high capacity
communications," including pager messages, cellular phone calls, and Internet
e-mails.57
In the Middle East, where mistrust and suspicion dominate inter-state

relationships, what are the prospects that states and private sector companies
will reach an agreement over encryption standards? For example, how can
Egypt be assured that Israeli intelligence is not employing the regional network
for espionage purposes? Since countries cannot require that an international
communications network be off-limits to the national intelligence service of
other states, the Arab countries of the Levant will be very reluctant to
cooperate in all matters regarding the establishment of joint regional
communications networks.
Hackers represent a similar problem, as exempli ed by the recent destruction

of an of cial Iraqi web site by an Israeli teenager. What will be the fate of an
inter-state project to build a regional data network after the rst Israeli
teenager uses some of the project's resources to damage a sensitive Egyptian
military database? Would the Egyptians accept the Israeli explanation that the
vandal was a fourteen-year old hacker who manipulated his father's university
Internet identi cation without his dad's consent or, alternatively, would the
Egyptians decide that the Israeli intelligence services were responsible for the
devastating attack on their sensitive computers? The prevalence and
popularity of conspiracy theories in Middle East politics strongly suggest that
the latter scenario is much more likely.
Private companies will build the right Internet—provided they have the
appropriate incentives. The global Internet community is growing by leaps and
bounds. At present, traf c on the Internet is doubling every 100 days, and the
U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that one billion users will employ
Web services by the year 2,005.58 Since the private sector is leading this
explosive growth of Internet activity, Middle East governments should delegate
all Internet projects to the private sector, which will execute them well in
pursuit of its own pro t.
But as of January 2000, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian
Authority together had about 1.5 percent of the total world population and only
0.014 percent of the total number of Internet hosts – less than 1/100 of its
proportionate share.59 In fact, in January 2000, the combined number of
Internet hosts in these countries was about equal to that of the Grand Duchy of
Luxembourg, which has a population just 0.5 percent as big as theirs. Though it
is dif cult to enumerate Internet users per country (i.e., because several users
can share a single Internet account), Alterman estimates that the entire Arab
world as a whole (including the Internet-savvy Gulf states) contained merely
0.3 percent of all Internet users worldwide by June 1998, and the Levant share
in this number was miniscule. Internet access rate for the private sector in the
Middle East are very low; merely 2 percent of all Internet users in the Middle
East came from the banking and insurance sectors.60 Worse yet, the gap
between the use of the Internet in the Arab countries of the Middle East and
the rest of the world appears to be increasing.
Hence, the Middle East lacks the critical mass needed to convince foreign and
local businessmen that it is wise to develop regional Internet-based private
companies. Currently and for the foreseeable future, there is no vibrant private
sector in the Arab countries of the Levant that can develop Internet solutions
for these countries.
Conclusion
The Internet is a double-edged sword that can work to promote different, and
sometimes con icting, causes in the Middle East. It can open up economies yet
at the same time increase the socio-economic gap between the knowledgeable
few and the impoverished many. It can disburse free information and
simultaneously provide governments with new powerful tools to track the daily
lives of citizens. It can broaden political participation while fragmenting
communities. Internet technologies can increase trust across borders through
access to information or decrease it by introducing new threats (such as data
encryption and hackers).
In all, the Internet revolution highlights and extenuates the political, economic,
and technological backwardness of Arab countries of the Levant. Rather than
boast about how the Internet will change the fortune of their countries,
political leaders, businessmen, and scholars should address the real problems
that inhibit growth and prosperity in their region – political restrictions on free
speech and economic entrepreneurship, corrupt and wasteful bureaucracies,
and collapsing education systems. Technological dreams must not be
encouraged if they distract attention from these more urgent problems that
require immediate attention and a great deal of hard work. Regrettably, all too
many people conjure up unattainable Internet dreams as a way to escape the
real problems of the Levant.
Alon Peled teaches the relationships between politics and

technology in the department of political science and public
administration at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
1 Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1999), pp. 207-210, 289-290.

2 Charles William Maynes, "The Middle East in the Twenty-First Century," The
Middle East Journal, 52 (1998): 11-12.

3 Kemal Dervis and Nemat Sha k, "The Middle East and North Africa: A Tale of
Two Futures," The Middle East Journal, 52 ((4), Autumn 1998): 512-513.
4 Jon E. Alterman, New Media, New Politics? From Satellite Television to the
Internet in the Arab World (Washington D.C.: The Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, 1999), pp. ix, 35.
5 Alterman, New Media, New Politics, p. xi.
6 Kelly R. Damphousse and Brent L. Smith, "The Internet: A Terrorist Medium
for the 21st Century," The Future of Terrorism: Violence in the new Millennium,
ed. Harvey W. Kushner (Thousands Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1998), pp. 222-223;
Pamela Ann Smith, "Global Publications Target Middle East," The Middle East,
Apr. 1999, pp. 33-34; Maud S. Beelman, "International Journalists Use Internet
Technology to Breach Borders," Nieman Reports, 53(1), Spring 1999, pp. 52-54;
John Younger, "Caught in the Net: Electronic Opportunities in Archaeology,"
Near Eastern Archaeology, 61(4), Dec. (1998): 263-264; Eric Silver, "A Flight for
Peace Begins in a Birdhouse," Time, Apr. 26, 1999, p. 52; "Mercury Center—In-
Depth News," "Q&A: Arab World Stepping Into Internet Age"May 21, 2000, at
http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/indepth/docs/qa052200.htm.
7 Clement M. Henry, "Promoting Democracy: USAID, at Sea or Off to
Cyberspace?" Middle East Policy, 5(1) Jan. 1997, pp. 178-189; Ingrid Volkmer,
"Universalism and Particularism: The Problems of Cultural Sovereignty and
Global Information Flow," Borders in Cyberspace: Information Policy and the
Global Information Infrastructure, ed. Brian Kahin and Chales Nesson
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), pp. 48-83.
8 Note, however, that the statistics for the Palestinian Authority (PA) available
in sources such as The World Economic Indicators and the statistical reports of
the Internet Software Consortium (ISC) are very limited. The PA was awarded
its own Internet suf x (PS) at the end of 1999. One report claims that there
were nine ISPs and 7,840 Internet dialup accounts mostly in the West Bank at
that time. NUA Internet Surveys, "Birzeit University: Palestine Awarded Top
Level Domain," Oct. 12, 1999, at http://www.nua.ie.
9 DITnet News Service, Nov. 7, 1997, at http://www.nua.ie; The Gulf Times, May
6, 1999, at http://www.nua.ie; DITnet, Jul. 5, 1999.

10 Alterman, New Media, New Politics?, pp. 40-41.
11 Jon Anderson, "The Internet and the Middle East: Commerce Brings Region
On-Line," Middle East Executive Reports, 20(12), Dec. 1997, p. 8.

12 David N. Greeneld, Virtual Addiction: Help for Netheads, Cyberfreaks, and
Those Who Love Them (New York: New Harbinger Publications, 1999), pp. 8-9.
13 USA Today, Feb. 17, 2000. See also U.S. News & World Report, Feb. 28, 2000.
14 A random scan of a popular index of Middle East Internet sites reveals that
the number of Middle East websites dedicated to Western entertainment (such

as rap music) is almost three times the number dedicated to local culture and
religion. See http:\www.middle-east-pages.com.
15 Quoted in Ernest J. Wilson, III, "Introduction: The Why, Where, and How of
National Information Initiatives," National Information Infrastructure Initiatives:

Vision and Policy Design, ed. Brian Kahim and Ernest J. Wilson III (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 1997), p. 19.

16 Anderson, "The Internet and the Middle East," pp. 15-16.
17 David Barsamian, "Interview with Edward W. Said," The Progressive, 63(4 ),
Apr. 1999, pp. 34-38.

18 Barry Eichengreen, "One Economy, Ready or Not: Thomas Friedman's Jaunt
through Globalization," Foreign Affairs, 78 (3): 119.

19 Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 226.

20 Newsweek, "Syria Fighting Losing Battle Against Internet," Apr. 27, 1999, at
http://www.nua.ie;; There are merely 2,000 Internet subscribers in Syria due

to access restrictions. Reuters, "Syria Gets Serious About the Net" Apr. 25, 2000
at http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,35882,00.html.
21 "The Internet in the Middle East and North Africa: Free Expression and
Censorship," Human Rights Watch, June 1999, at

http://www.hrw.org/hrw/advocacy/internet/mena/index.htm.
22 Ibid.
23 Alterman, New Media, New Politics?, p. 47.
24 Poh-Kam Wong, "Implementing the NII Vision: Singapore's Experience and
Future Challenges," National Information Infrastructure Initiatives, ed. Brian

Kahim and Ernest J. Wilson III (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), pp. 44, 52. See
also: Gary Leonard Koh and Lee Kwok Cheong, "Government Information
Technology Policy in Singapore," Informatization and the Public Sector, 2 (1992),
pp. 155-163, and Hung Kei Tang and K.T. identi es himself as K.T. Yeo Yeo,
"Technology, Entrepreneurship and National Development: Lessons From
Singapore," International Journal of Technology Management, 10 (1995), pp. 797-
814.
25 "The End of Privacy: The Surveillance Society," no au listed "The End of
Privacy: The Surveillance Society," The Economist, May 1, 1999, pp. 19-23; "The
Internet in the Middle East," Human Rights Watch.
26 Sharif S. Elmusa, "Faust without the Devil? The Interplay of Technology and
Culture in Saudi Arabia," The Middle East Journal, 51 ((3), Summer 1997): 345-357;
BBC Online Network, "Saudi Arabia Delays Announcing ISP Licenses," Oct. 13,
1998 at http://www.nua.ie;Techserver, "Saudi Arabia Issues First ISP Licenses,"
Nov. 5, 1998, at http//www.nua.ie; USA Today, "Limited Internet Access for
Saudi Arabia," Nov. 5, 1997; "Saudi Arabia Limits ISP Fees," Internetnews.com,
Nov. 19, 1998, at http://www.nua.ie; "Saudi Arabia Opens Up Internet Access,"
Techserver, Feb. 3, 1999, at http://www.nua.ie; The Douglas Jehl, "The Internet's
'Open Sesame' Is Answered Warily," New York Times, Mar. 18, 1999.
27 Eichengreen, "One Economy" p. 119.

28 Alterman, New Media, New Politics?, p. 75.
29 Ibid., p. 38.
30 The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), which grants
Internet addresses under the CN top-level domain, conducts all of its business
and Internet registration processes through a website that is available only in
the Mandarin language. See the China Internet Network Information Center
(CNNIC) at http://www.cnnic.cn/.: Vision and Policy Design, ed. Brian Kahim
and Ernest J. Wilson III (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997).
31 William B. Quandt, "The Middle East on the Brink: Prospects for Change in
the 21st Century," The Middle East Journal, 50 ((1), Winter 1996): 9-17.
32 Naomi Collett, "Crossed Lines and Loose Connections," Middle East, (June
1998), pp. 35-37.

33 Ibid. p. 35.
34 Friedman, The Lexus and The Olive Tree, p. 275.
35 Daniel Klaidman and Matt Rees, "A Ma a State?" Newsweek, May 29, 2000.
36 No au provided "Company & Industry: Middle East," Country Report, Apr. 30,
1997.
37 Anderson, "The Internet and the Middle East," p. 11.
38 "The Internet in the Middle East," Human Rights Watch; Friedman, The Lexus
and the Olive Tree, pp. 168-171.

39 Internetnews.com, Feb. 22, 1999, at http://www.nua.ie.
40 DITnet, Mar. 3, 1998; "E-Commerce in the Arab World — An Overview,"
Internet Arab World, Apr. 23, 1998, at http://www.nua.ie; Internetnews.com, Feb.

22, 1999, at http://www.nua.ie.
41 Stanley Aronowitz and William Difazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the
Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 3, 9, 33.

42 The Knesset, The Michael Eytan Committee, "Israel's Economy in the
Information Age, Sect. 6," Israel Preparedness for the Information Age [Hebrew
Document] (Jerusalem: The Knesset, 1997), pp. 11-12. The Knesset, "Israel
Preparedness for the Information Age" [Session 67 of the 15th Knesset (January
4, 2000)], Israel Parliamentary Records [Hebrew Document] (Jerusalem: The
Knesset, 2000), pp. 1-12. Documents are also available at:
http://www.knesset.gov.il/knesset/hebframe.htm.
43 The Economist, June 24, 2000.
44 Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, p. 260.
45 David Rosenberg, "Ahead of the Game," In "Israel: 50 Years of Finance &
Industry," The Jerusalem Post Special Issue, July 1998 at http://www.jpost.co.il.
46 Steve Yetiv, "Peace, Interdependence, and the Middle East," Political Science
Quarterly, Spring 1997, p. 35.

47 World Economic Indicators, 1998, The World Bank, at
http://www.oecd.org/dac/indicators/htm/datasource.htm.
48 Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, p. 174.
49 Dervis and Sha k, "The Middle East and North Africa," p. 513.
50 Christopher R. Kedzie, "The Third Waves," Borders in Cyberspace: Information
Policy and the Global Information Infrastructure, ed. Brian Kahin and Charles
Nesson (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), pp. 116-117.
51 Data based on reports from Internet Software Consortium at
http://www.nw.com/zone/WWW/top.html.
52 DITnet, Nov. 7, 1997; and "Almost One Million Online in Arab Countries," Jul. 5,
1999, at http://www.nua.ie.
53 Anderson, "The Internet and the Middle East," p. 9.
54 For example, see the Saudi Ministry of Information at
http://www.saudinf.com /main/start.htm..
55 "The Internet in the Middle East," Human Rights Watch.
56 Jim Gray and Gordon Bell, VLDB 95 Parallel Database Systems Survey, 1995,
quoted in Glenn Ricart, "Dimensions of the Internet: Issues for the Next Five
Years," presentation to the Internet Society of Israel Conference, Tel Aviv,
Israel, Jan. 13, 1999.
57 Tom Forester and Perry Morrison, Computer Ethics: Cautionary Tales and
Ethical Dilemmas in Computing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), pp.
147-152; John Markoff, "A Mysterious Component Roils Microsoft," The New York
Times, Sept. 4, 1999; Vernon Loeb, "Critics Questioning NSA Reading Habits,"
The Washington Post, Nov. 13, 1999.
58 Struggling with IT: The Growing Complexity of Information Technology,
Integris White Paper, 1999 (Billerica, Mass.: Integris Group, 1999), p. 3.

59 Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority had 9,982
Internet hosts of the 72,398,092 global Internet hosts in January 2,000. Israel
had 139,946 Internet hosts at that time. Numbers are based on the statistical
reports of the Internet Software Consortium at http://www.nw.com.
60 Alterman, New Media, New Politics?, pp. 36, 38.

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29/09/2020 Debunking the Internet Myth: Technological Prophecies and Middle East Politics :: Middle East Quarterly

An impressive array of analysts are predicting that Internet-based technologies

By way of an answer to these general questions, we identify nine widely

Secondly, the Levantine countries share a reasonably homogeneous

I. The Political Dream

A growing body of evidence suggests, however, that the Internet is eroding,

mutual obligations is as strong as its potential to contribute to the free ow of

The Internet will democratize centralized regimes. According to George Gilder,

But, as Ithiel de Sola Pool has argued, government policies determine if

Without exception, the Tunisians we interviewed said they believed

assumption because of the level of police surveillance of telephone

Governments can extend existing Draconian press and publication laws to

Governments can also employ powerful surveillance techniques to monitor

In addition to exercising surveillance, governments can discourage

English-illiterate masses are restricted to utilizing these resources; that is what

The Internet will create new opportunities for inter-state cooperation.

Alas, information does not exist without physical infrastructures, such as

communications. To protect themselves from tough foreign competition, the

International telecommunications companies will also suffer from this "national

II. The Economic Dream

A vicious circle has developed: poor communications infrastructure and high

Using the of cial statistical reports produced by the Internet Software

III. The Cultural Dream

The Internet offers an opportunity to strengthen core cultural values. Jon

Our problem is... we are a traditional society, and we have to know if

IV. The Technological Dream

In the Middle East, where mistrust and suspicion dominate inter-state

Hackers represent a similar problem, as exempli ed by the recent destruction

Alon Peled teaches the relationships between politics and

Giroux, 1999), pp. 207-210, 289-290.

Middle East Journal, 52 (1998): 11-12.

6 Kelly R. Damphousse and Brent L. Smith, "The Internet: A Terrorist Medium

6, 1999, at http://www.nua.ie; DITnet, Jul. 5, 1999.

On-Line," Middle East Executive Reports, 20(12), Dec. 1997, p. 8.

the number of Middle East websites dedicated to Western entertainment (such

National Information Initiatives," National Information Infrastructure Initiatives:

The MIT Press, 1997), p. 19.

Apr. 1999, pp. 34-38.

through Globalization," Foreign Affairs, 78 (3): 119.

Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 226.

http://www.nua.ie;; There are merely 2,000 Internet subscribers in Syria due

Censorship," Human Rights Watch, June 1999, at

Future Challenges," National Information Infrastructure Initiatives, ed. Brian

27 Eichengreen, "One Economy" p. 119.

1998), pp. 35-37.

and the Olive Tree, pp. 168-171.

Internet Arab World, Apr. 23, 1998, at http://www.nua.ie; Internetnews.com, Feb.

Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 3, 9, 33.

Industry," The Jerusalem Post Special Issue, July 1998 at http://www.jpost.co.il.

Quarterly, Spring 1997, p. 35.

Integris White Paper, 1999 (Billerica, Mass.: Integris Group, 1999), p. 3.

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