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As the Internet began diffusing around the globe in the mid to late 1990s, a number of
scholars maintained that this new medium represented an inherently liberal sphere of
communication. Legal academics argued that the Internet’s border-spanning nature and control-
frustrating technological characteristics either rendered territorially-based regulatory efforts
completely obsolete (Johnson and Post 1996) or allowed users to choose the national jurisdiction
under which they wished to be governed, with the most liberal regulatory regime setting the
standard (Froomkin 1997). Political scientists and policy scholars suggested that an
uncontrollable Internet would prove particularly challenging to authoritarian rule: Taubman
(1998: 256) posited a “built-in incompatibility between nondemocratic rule and the Internet”
because of the free flow of ideas that could be found online, and Kedzie (1997) argued that the
technology posed a “dictator’s dilemma” to autocrats who must either connect to the Internet and
democratize or shun the information revolution and accept economic decline.
In this paper I argue that, contrary to early claims about the Internet in authoritarian
regimes, this technology does not represent an inherently liberal sphere of communication.
Rather, authoritarian governments can exert quite effective control over use of the Internet by
manipulating the architecture of this flexible technology and by leveraging laws, social norms,
and market conditions in ways that significantly raise the cost of unfettered Internet access.
However, while diffusion of the Internet in authoritarian regimes does not constitute an
automatic extension of civil liberties, this technology may well prove to be an important tool for
promoting another type of political reform: bureaucratization. In countries where rampant
corruption threatens the effectiveness of public administration and the legitimacy of authoritarian
rule, leaders who prevent use of the Internet to challenge their monopoly on power may
Convention