“Keeping your enemies offline can cripple their chances of overthrowing you,” reports the MIT Technology Review. Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes their article:

Whether or not your ethnic group has political power is a crucial factor determining your access to the Internet, according to a new analysis. The effect varies from country to country, and is much less pronounced in democratic nations. But the study, published today in Science, suggests that besides censorship, another way national governments prevent opposing groups from organizing online is by denying them Internet access in the first place, says Nils Weidmann, a professor of political science at the University of Konstanz in Germany.

Researchers used a geolocation database to create a map showing subnetwork activity for a large volume of internet traffic, then compared it with geographic data for the world’s ethnic groups. “They concluded that excluded groups had significantly lower access compared to the groups in power, and that this can’t be explained by other economic or geographic factors (like living in rural vs. urban areas)… ‘You don’t have to censor if the opposition doesn’t get access at all.’ “

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Source: Slashdot – Are Governments Denying Internet Access To Their Political Opponents?