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Taiwan needs Internet
freedom
By Shyu Ting-yao ®}®¼Ä£
Taiwanese have been shocked by media reports about a sex party held in a train
carriage. Because the people who booked the carriage got together through the
Internet and an underage girl allegedly played the ¡§female lead¡¨ at the party,
children¡¦s welfare groups are once again calling for stricter controls to be
imposed on the Internet. Some are even calling for a Taiwanese version of
China¡¦s ¡§Great Firewall¡¨ to block overseas Web sites that carry undesirable
content.
These ideas about Internet control are not in themselves impractical, and, at
least from a purely theoretical point of view, such as may be held by people who
do not use the Internet very much, there is nothing wrong with them ¡X except of
course that they would make Taiwan a laughing stock. One thing people might ask
is: Why not also impose controls on mobile phones, since they are also sometimes
used as instruments of crime?
The online business environment in Taiwan is pretty bad, the main reason being
that the power to make policies and speak out about Internet issues is mostly in
the hands of people who do not use the Internet very much. I have attended
conferences organized by government departments to discuss Internet-related
issues, and people who run online businesses are always in a minority. Instead,
most of the people invited are academics. The problem is that the new issues
that keep cropping up are not a focus for academic research in Taiwan.
The government¡¦s definition of who is an Internet businessperson is also very
broad. It would be very odd if the government invited LCD makers to a conference
about memory chips, but it often does much the same thing in relation to the
Internet. Internet businesses can roughly be divided into advertising,
electronic commerce, online gaming, Web media, sundry online services, mobile
phone Web services and so on. How can people who do not even understand these
basic categories possibly make the right kinds of policy decisions?
However, the one thing that government and elected officials can always be
relied on to do is to invite the most conservative civic groups to attend
conferences on how to regulate the Internet.
There is no point in talking about how Taiwan¡¦s electronics industry can be
restructured to put software and cloud--computing services at the forefront if
we do not have a robust Internet business sector. It also follows that there is
no point talking about a robust Internet business sector if, every time a news
story makes waves, a lot of moralistic people who have little or nothing to do
with Internet business are given carte blanche to bash the hell out of Web
services.
Although other countries have measures in place to regulate the Internet, few
put amateurs in charge of professionals as happens in Taiwan.
Crude measures taken to regulate the Internet have stifled online business in
Taiwan. The outcome is that Taiwanese use US-based Facebook as their favorite
social Web site and Canada-based Plurk for microblogging. To watch videos they
go to Chinese sites like PPS, Youku (Àu»Å) and Tudou (¤g¨§), and they post their
views on Hong Kong discussion forums. Even Taiwan¡¦s biggest Internet media
portal ¡X Yahoo ¡X is foreign owned.
However, regulations have done nothing to stop Taiwanese users from downloading
pirated music and movies, so the moralists now want the government to cut off
access to overseas Web sites that provide such things. There are quite a few
countries around the world that have done just that. A quick online search
reveals which countries those are, and I don¡¦t think Taiwan really wants to be
listed among them.
On the one hand, the government is eager to get Taiwan listed as one of the
world¡¦s most competitive economies, but on the other, it displays a certain
disdain for those factors that contribute most to competitiveness.
As far as the train sex party is concerned, there are plenty of ways of dealing
with such abuses. The government could easily handle the case through the normal
channels, without special new laws and regulations.
Even countries that strictly control online content do not have special
regulations that get in the way of smartphone applications, but in Taiwan,
people have not been able to buy apps from Google¡¦s Android Market for nearly a
year now. This negative signal makes a joke of the government¡¦s much-vaunted
plan to set up an app business zone. No sooner had some consumers lodged
complaints than the Taipei City Government blocked app sales, with the result
that the app development business has been put on hold across the nation.
Evidently, the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.
People in the know are very worried about the impact the cloud networking trend
pioneered by Apple and Google is having on Taiwan¡¦s electronics industry. It is
a bit like when foreign steamships forced Tokugawa Japan to end its self-imposed
isolation. Now, as then, there are plenty of traditionalists who would like to
take the country back to the Middle Ages. Is that really the way Taiwan wants to
go?
Shyu Ting-yao is chief executive of the Association of Digital Culture
Taiwan.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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