The Nieman Foundation says there are over 2,900 Cuban public interest blogs.

Yoani Sánchez launched her blog, Generation Y, in April 2007. (Her first post contrasted the freedom Cuban's had to display posters saying “Go Santiago!” during baseball playoffs with their inability to display a poster saying “Internet for all!"). In 2011, she told us that the free blogosphere had taken off. A recent post on the Nieman Foundation blog says there are now over 2,900 blogs dedicated to debate and discussion of issues related to the public interest in Cuba. (Is there a report underlying that statistic)?

The blogs are based in Cuba, Spain, the US and other nations with Cuban communities, and they are often in conflict with the Cuban state media. For example, a blogger disclosed math test fraud in Cuban college entrance exams the day after the exams were praised in the state media. Since Internet access is highly limited in Cuba, blog news is often distributed on the "street networks" which we have described in these earlier posts.

It takes a while, but it seems that even in Cuba information truly does want to be free -- at least in one sense of the word.

Meeting of the Cuban "blogger academy" in 2009

Cuba's sneaker net

Yaima Pardo, 34, in her home in Cuba as she describes her project PaSA
(Paquete Semanal Autnomo), an independent weekly digital-media package for Cuba

A recent article (English or Spanish) describes the black market distribution of music, soap operas, TV programs, movies, magazines, Web sites, etc. on flash drives.

There is a tiered distribution system. A terabyte drive arrives each week in Havana and is replicated for distributors and eventually sold to end users on the street or delivered to homes. While the material is generally sold to the end user, ads are starting to pop up on distributions. The article does not say whether there are competing distribution networks or how material is selected for inclusion. A detailed description of the process would be most interesting.

The distributions contain no political messages or pornography. The article quotes one person as speculating that Cuban authorities might tolerate the weekly “packages.” It is not clear to me whether the master packages are downloaded or brought in on portable drives, but the authorities turning a blind eye would facilitate either means.

The article also describes PaSA (Paquete Semanal Autonomo) a project of film maker Yaima Pardo. Pardo and her colleagues hope to produce an independent, weekly digital-media package that will be open to more controversial content and distributed for free.

Blog Bang Cuba: a Cuban blogging documentary

Claudio Peláez Sordo has made a documentary on Cuban blogging for his masters thesis at the University of Havana. It shows interview snippets of specialists and bloggers who access the Internet from school or work accounts controlled by the Cuban government.

The video was posted September 3, but has had only 458 views so far.

Whose domain space is it anyway?

Governments shouldn’t get in the way of the people who run the internet. Fine sentiments reported by the Guardian from UK Culture Minister Ed Vaizey at the Internet Governance Forum in Istanbul this week.  They echo his speech to the ICANN meeting in London in June: "What governments shouldn’t be doing is attempting to manage how the internet is run."

Fine sentiments, but does the UK government live up to them?

Regrettably the UK government has not been immune from the temptation to take powers over internet governance institutions.  Sections 19 to 21 of the Digital Economy Act 2010 gave it power to take direct control of the .uk domain by putting a manager into Nominet.  The sections have not been brought into force, let alone the powers exercised.  But the government hardly needs to once the potential exists.

In the current interstate tug-of-war over global internet governance every State accuses every other State of donning fig leaves to conceal self-interest.  Here is an opportunity for the UK government to plant a flag in the high ground, to say ‘We mean what we say.  We have backed off, how about you?’

So make the bold move, repeal Sections 19 to 21 and issue the challenge. 

Or would the government backpedal? We can hear it now. “Reserve powers, only to be deployed in the last resort in the interests of UK plc, the Secretary of State cannot use them unless there is a serious failure in limited circumstances…” (See here the reasons put forward at the time the powers were legislated). 

That won't wash.  If failings are for a national government, not the internet governance community to sort out then fine sentiments are just so much vapour.  Letting go of powers is more than desirable, it is a litmus test.