Asia Wary of Being Wired

On the Internet, laser pulses packed with information cut through international borders at light speed, driving holes in the dikes of traditional authority everywhere and promoting political freedom and free markets.

That’s the theory, anyway.

In reality, the worldwide computer network is exposing the ambivalent attitudes that many governments and societies harbor about the free flow of information--and is being molded to take them into account.

Nowhere is this more striking than in Asia. Lured by the potential economic benefits of Internet connections, the East is rapidly embracing the Net’s revolutionary technology while rejecting its underlying ideology of free information, equality and unbridled competition.

In puritanical Singapore, political leaders worry that the Internet will undermine morality. They have taken to reading private e-mail as part of an all-out effort to beat back the menace of online pornography.

China is afraid that the Internet will foment political rebellion. So officials are limiting access and making sure that the Chinese portion can easily be severed from the world in the event of a political uprising such as 1989’s Tiananmen Square protests.

Hong Kong, a powerful outpost of the global electronics industry, is worried about gangsters and the threat that hackers pose to business. Law enforcement officials have carried out raids on Internet service providers to root out any criminals.

And in Japan, traditional cultural insularity means that even as government agencies, academic institutions and corporations rush to the Internet and scour it for information, they are doing little to put on information of their own.

Asia isn’t the only region concerned about content on the Internet. In Germany, authorities have launched an aggressive campaign against online pornography and neo-Nazi literature. In one case, they forced U.S.-based online provider Compuserve to suspend customer access to 200 sexually explicit discussion groups. In the United States, Congress this week passed legislation that would ban “indecent” material online unless steps were taken to block access by children.

But fear of what the Internet makes possible runs much deeper in Asia, where traditional cultures place a high value on a strict moral and economic order. Governments stand ready to enforce those values, even when it requires the kind of heavy-handed regulation and monitoring that would, at the very least, cause an uproar in many Western countries.

And all across Asia, there’s a visible clash between the Internet’s basic function as an information exchange medium and cultures where information is a closely guarded commodity, something parted with sparingly to friends over a drink.

On the portion of the Internet known as the World Wide Web, for example, a number of American sites feature lengthy government reports and scientific studies as well as lively debates about government policy. Comparable Asian sites typically offer little beyond public relations materials from government agencies and corporations. The critical discussions that do take place typically are hosted in America.

The reluctance of major Asian organizations to put important information on their Web sites--along with the need for Westerners to use special software to read any local language documents that exist--has resulted in a largely one-way flow of information, from America to Asia.

Instead of a vibrant community with extensive give and take, the Internet looks like a hub based in America--and, to a lesser extent, Europe--with spokes stretching out across the world. In some respects, of course, this uneven development is simply a result of the fact that Asia--as well as most of the developing world--is years behind the United States in building Internet connections.

Last year, Japan had 150,000 host computers acting as gateways to the Internet, compared to 3.9 million in the United States.

Asian households are not heavy computer users. While every third household in the United States has a computer, even in technologically advanced Japan only one household in 10 has one. Because few Asians have learned to use a keyboard, even those with access to e-mail often prefer to use fax machines.

Seattle-based Spry reports a booming business in Japan selling its “Internet-in-a-Box,” a full set of software required for cruising the Net. Yet only four or five of the 5,000 employees at TransCosmos, the product’s distributor in Japan, actually use the Internet, says Richard Novotny, international marketing manager for the firm.

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A major obstacle is cost. Telecommunications markets in Asia are dominated by government-controlled monopolies or duopolies that maintain high prices for Internet connections. The high-capacity “T1” circuits used by companies to offer Internet services, for example, cost $20,000 to $30,000 a month in Japan. The same line costs about $5,000 a month in the United States.

“Asia is behind because there are rigorous regulatory regimes in places like Taiwan, China, Japan and Korea,” says Henricus Cox, executive director for Sprint International. “These countries are not known for innovative services.”

Still, Asia is clearly catching Internet fever. U.S. communications companies such as Sprint and UUNET report a booming business installing communications links for newly formed Internet access providers in a number of Asian countries. China plans to establish Net links to more than 1,000 university campuses by decade’s end.

Philippine President Fidel V. Ramos and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad exchanged e-mail for the first time last week to show they were up on the latest technology--but both vowed that their nations will pursue “proper” use of the information highway.

The benefits of tying into the global network are clear enough: access to leading-edge research, technology and other information.

A Malaysian or Korean businessman can tap into the Net, download and freely use a video conferencing system developed at Cornell University, for example. Many professional societies publish technical papers on the Internet long before the articles appear in print.

China is also looking to the Internet as an important way to offer business and government services. Rather than have regional offices send in paper reports as the United States does, provincial officials will input into Internet databases, says Louis Gallio, executive director of Asia Info Services, a Dallas-based consulting company that works with the Chinese government.

“The Chinese now see [the Internet] as an economic necessity,” he says.

And the Net can be an important link for otherwise isolated societies. Tony Rutkowski, formerly president of the Internet Society, a nonprofit group in charge of charting the network’s growth, once received a delegation of Western-educated scientists and professionals from the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. They wanted an Internet link so they could keep up with modern developments.

When Bernard Krisher, co-author of a book with Cambodian President Norodom Sihanouk, sought a way to help that war-ravaged nation break out of its isolation, he chose the Internet. Krisher spent an evening on his laptop soliciting donations from corporations to help connect Cambodian government agencies and universities with the World Wide Web.

“Soon, students at Phnom Penh University can have access to the same data U.S. universities routinely use,” Sprint’s Cox says.

His company has offered free satellite service for the project, although Phnom Penh University, racked by civil war, has no electricity, sewage system or library.

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For the most part, however, Asian efforts to promote Internet technology are narrowly focused on government ministries, businesses and academics. And while governments are eager to exploit the advantages of the Internet, they make no bones about rejecting its American-flavored ideology of free markets and open access to information.

In places such as Singapore and China, government attitudes are reflected in efforts to control the kind of information that enters the country over the Internet.

While many Americans are concerned about pornography, tax evasion and destructive hackers, there is also strong resistance to government intervention. But there is little such popular resistance in most of Asia.

Last March, Hong Kong police raided the offices of seven Internet providers, arrested eight people and cut off 5,000 business and residential users from the Net because of concern about hackers.

Last month, China drafted rules that reportedly will require the government to screen people given Internet access and to find ways to filter out offensive materials.

China’s official New China News Agency recently announced plans to establish an Internet network with no overseas links, with the goal of offering Web sites to 200,000 state-owned companies. China Internet Corp., the news agency’s subsidiary, told reporters that a major strength of the service will be that if China ever shut down its Internet connection to the world, “our service will probably be the only one available.”

In less authoritarian regimes, such as Japan, it is heavy regulation, the low rate of computer use and a reluctance to share information that inhibit growth beyond a narrow community of government, academic and business users.

“Japan is known as an information gatherer, not an information sender,” says Ken Uchikura, president of Pacific Software Publishing, a Japanese company with branches in Tokyo and Seattle.

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When information is only reluctantly shared between two divisions of a company or ministry, it is unlikely to be put on the Internet, Uchikura says.

“The nature of the Internet is that you provide information for free or for a low cost,” says Robert Helsing, an East Asian bibliographer at the University of Oregon who manages a Web site offering links to Asian resources. “But they really want to sell their stuff, not give it away.”

That’s not surprising, because there is little tradition of access to public information in most of Asia. Even Japan has few research libraries, for example, and those that do exist are poorly organized, seldom store key public documents and are often inaccessible to the average citizen.

Ironically, Asia’s effort to promote the Internet primarily as an instrument for economic development could backfire. Kenichi Omae, the former head of the Tokyo office of consulting giant McKinsey & Co. and author of “Internet Revolution,” argues that service industries will migrate from countries like Japan that have rigid regulations and high operating costs.

That could give U.S. companies a competitive edge. Already, most Asian Internet services are managed by U.S. communications companies and use hubs in the United States. The e-mail a Malaysian sends to a colleague in nearby Indonesia will travel the low-cost route--across the Pacific to the United States and back.

The vibrant Internet community in the United States generates most Internet innovations. Japanese consumer electronics giant Sharp established its multimedia research center in New Jersey so it could keep a closer eye on Internet developments in the United States.

“The new product concepts are going to come from the U.S.,” says Philip Abram, director of the Sharp center. He notes wryly that the center communicates with its home office in Japan largely by fax rather than e-mail.

The Internet could also prove a Trojan horse for U.S. companies eager to sell in difficult markets like Japan. Uchikura of Pacific Software is recruiting U.S. companies to put advertisements in Japanese on his Web page as a way of selling products to Japan.

“One of the hottest things in Japan today is direct imports,” says Uchikura, citing the popularity of L.L. Bean and other catalogs.

The Internet may yet evolve into a hybrid that can put deep roots into Asia’s local cultures. Youngsters, in particular, seem taken with the Net’s variety, breadth and freedom. Internet “cafes,” where youngsters can drink coffee while navigating the Web, are popping up across Tokyo.

A new breed of entrepreneur is starting to emerge. After watching a Web browser during a trade show two years ago, Kenichi Ozaki, 28, and Toru Fujita, 26, of Japan started a low-cost Internet service named Bekkoame, after a traditional candy. The company already is one of the lowest-cost providers, although customers complain they often can’t get through.

And there is growing recognition that fairness demands a healthy two-way flow of information.

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Hiroshi Mizushima of Japan’s National Cancer Center Research Institute is moving to make more research available over the Net in English to counter criticism that Japanese do too little to transfer technology overseas.

But early signs are that the Internet in Asia is a long way from becoming a vibrant community of economic or cultural interest. And efforts to control “undesirable” material could stunt the network’s growth without stemming the flow of unwanted information.

Uchikura says he recently was asked by several Japanese companies to develop software that would allow customers to let their computers automatically surf the Web for pornographic pictures and download them during the middle of the night when communication costs are low.

“Eighty percent of the traffic on the Internet [in Japan] is still adult-oriented,” Uchikura says.