Online Prague Spring? The Impact of Rising Censorship on Content-Driven Economies

The BBC News provides a preview of a warning to be issued by human rights organization Amnesty International about the spread of government censorship of Internet Web sites through filtering and more direct means. This statement from AI:

"The Chinese model of an internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers," said Tim Hancock, Amnesty's campaign director.

"Unless we act on this issue, the internet could change beyond all recognition in the years to come.

More and more governments are realising the utility of controlling what people see online and major internet companies, in an attempt to expand their markets, are colluding in these attempts," he said.

The implication here is that the capitulation of companies such as Google, Yahoo and other leading online portals to censorship efforts is just the tip of the iceberg. Premium content publishers have also been eager to push their content into emerging markets and accepting government censorship policies on face value. In other words, IP owners see the ability for governments to enforce who sees what as a convenient extension to their own requirements to manage the distribution of their IP. What we have perceived as a worldwide content-driven revolution in human communications may wind up being a rather short Prague Spring of openness.

In the short run publishers may have little choice to do otherwise, given the weak precedents that have been established by major online players reluctant to cede global market share to other companies. But it will not take too long for the game to change. I noted in my presentation earlier this year on "Chasing the Mammoth" that the contextual model for creating content value benefits most when content is allowed to roam free. We're used to having economic models that emphasize ownership and perimeter control as the primary basis for economic strength. But with the ability for people of all nations to collaborate with one another to create insight into key problems and opportunities ownership becomes less important than access to skills to solve problems and the ability to influence others with your opinion about these problems. In this context-driven information economy ownership of resources is not as important as being able to move your intellectual resources to where the opportunities are for income and growth, regardless of its geographic location.

Corporations have acted as a bridge to a context-driven economy over the past several decades, breaking down political barriers to enable them to move to where resources and markets are on a global basis to make use of them. But the corporate model still employs ownership of resources and intellectual property as they key engine for its growth. It's simply a more distributed version of the nation-state model. The contextual model of economic growth pioneered on the Web implies that corporate capital will need to become contextual also in order to be the most successful.

In other words, like our friends the ice-age hunters chasing the mammoth owning things will not be as important as being able to be present in the most valuable moments of opportunity with the right skills and influence. If your assets are not where the opportunities are, then you do not really have capital. In this economic scenario insight becomes the key scarce resource - and insight is highly contextual. Like crowdsourcing opportunities in social media corporate assets will be combined much more fluidly in any number of opportunities that will provide far more distributed and complex revenue and capital models than ever before.

The most successful companies in this economic model will resemble companies like Google or Yahoo far more than General Motors or Exxon/Mobil. They will be either creators of context or aggregators of skills and influence that can reassemble themselves around new and unique problems and opportunities far more quickly than entities focused on ownership.

Underdeveloped African nations, carved out by European nations intent on exploiting natural resources, suffer greatly in large part because resource ownership as a focus failed to drive their economies towards developing intellectual assets that could follow market opportunities independent of geographic location. Restricting access to information that could help to develop intellectual assets only hampers these efforts further: their most intelligent and inventive minds will continue to move to other economies where there is less restriction of access to similar minds. The efforts to "own" their citizens through censorship will only hamper their ability to participate in the global economy.

In other words, ownership-centric economies are leading - quite literally - to starvation, not because of lack of global resources but because ownership issues prevent those resources from moving to the most important contexts, and vice versa. The real solution for these post-colonial nations is to reverse their economic models and to become "open source" nations - nations who encourage their citizens to have the most open access to information and opportunities possible. Since many of their nations have dwindling natural resources anyway there is little to lose by attempting this model.

When global corporations emerged in the 20th century to make use of post-colonial nations, they simply filled the gap of European corporate sponsors for resource exploitation with  more global sponsorship. They did little to encourage the development of intellectual capital in these nations, in large part because it would only be an impediment to resource ownership. But in an era in which corporate growth depends on reaping the benefits of intellectual capital from any potential corner of the earth there needs to be a major investment in intellectual growth in every nation. Censorship will only slow down nations in attaining this goal.

In this sense the global failure of post-colonial national economies is a presaging of the impending disappearance of traditional corporate economies. Exxon-Mobil is, for the moment, the largest U.S. corporation based on its ability to "win" the traditional global resources ownership game for energy. But it is far more likely that in the next fifty years the nations that employ non-ownership-based energy resources (solar, wind, hydroelectric) through the most rapid and efficient deployment of intellectual capital are going to trump the ownership model in powering their nation's economies.

They will be able to do this and to respond to energy shortages and potential global warming threats far more efficiently through open collaborative models than through traditional "firewall"-based corporate development structures. Moreover, since many of these energy alliances will wind up being cross-border arrangements for development and maintenance the more loose federations of skills and influence that develop these energy resources are likely to be powerful "tribes" unto themselves, likely corporate in structure but not necessarily so. Regardless of their specific organizational form, though, these types of cross-border collaborations between talented peers on global problems such as energy production and global warming are likely to become the first true Content Nation economies beyond pure publishing enterprises.

Well, this is a long way from the original BBC article on censorship but I think that you will get the drift of where this is taking us. It is not likely that global censorship of the Web will be fought very effectively through corporations trying to exploit local resources. Government policies that take into account the benefit of  Content Nations" to their own economies and which can persuade developing post-colonial governments to collaborate with them in these efforts are more likely to persuade these governments to reduce or eliminate censorship - and in the process of doing so open up even more opportunities for publishers of all kinds. The governments that succeed in promoting this model are far more likely to be winners in a global economy that benefits most from highly mobile and adaptable content-driven resources.  They may, or may not, be the world leaders that we see today. Alternatively we may begin to see broader investment by corporations more likely to benefit from Content Nation economies. Some combination of governmental and corporate advancement towards Content Nation economies is the most likely scenario, but until governments are willing to foster these types of corporations more effectively it's more likely to be government policy taking the lead.