Rebecca MacKinnon and Evgeny Morozov, fellows at the Open Society Institute, writing in the Moscow Times:
Even the most cold-hearted realists would agree that the failure of communist censorship played a role in the collapse of the Iron Curtain: Voice of America, the fax machine, rock ‘n’ roll and the lure of Western capitalism helped to win over the people of the Soviet bloc.
Today, similar hopes are often vested in the Internet, with high expectations that the wealth of online information might trigger the same kind of censorship failure that we saw in Eastern Europe in contemporary authoritarian states — and with the same results.
