International Law

No online campaigning in Japan

Newsweek has a revealing report on how Japan has blocked online campaigning.  It is remarkable to discover that such a technologically advanced nation places such extensive restrictions on online campaigning:

Try to use the Internet in an actual campaign, however, and you run into serious obstacles. The first hitch is Japan's 58-year-old election law. (Originally intended for printed matter, the law has been extended to cover virtual material as well.) Once an official campaign has started, candidates are barred from updating their home pages, launching or amending blogs?podcasts are allowed because the law applies only to text or images?posting political statements or sending text messages to mobile phones. Additional regulations prohibit donors from using credit cards online to support candidates, effectively preventing online fundraising.

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As Kim Jung Hoon, a Keio University professor who is lobbying for liberalization of the Japanese Web, puts it, Japan "is ruled by a very stable and old political system." Kim says that "politicians, bureaucrats, the media and big business are all very tightly interconnected. Basically they want to suppress and eliminate any possibility for change. And the Internet is a major source of change."

Japan's nonconfrontational culture probably also plays a role. Despite the proliferation of blogs in the country, there is a notable lack of political polemic online?in remarkable contrast to neighboring South Korea, where the fates of heads can rise and fall on the whim of a fiery Internet culture. Even when Japanese politicians are allowed to post what they want?namely, outside campaign periods?the results are still strikingly tame. "It's so weird," says Kumi Yokoe, a political analyst and e-government expert. "Why don't Japanese politicians talk about what's going on in the [legislature]? It's always about who I met, what I ate. For that you don't need a Web site."

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Like it or not, however, signs of change are beginning to emerge. Politicians have begun discovering the power of YouTube and similar sites as ways of generating buzz. During recent municipal elections in Tokyo and Osaka, some Web enthusiasts used video-sharing sites to post videos of candidates' speeches even during campaigning. Other Netizens updated the Wikipedia pages of certain candidates in defiance of the ban. The police sent warnings to offenders, but no arrests were made.

Internet users are also finally starting to flex their muscles. Kim is the initiator of a group called The Contents Association, which is pushing for gradual reform of the telecommunications bureaucracy to allow for greater checks and balances. He also advocates "spectrum reform," the auctioning off of space on the airwaves?much of which is now being freed up as Japanese TV broadcasters shift to fiber-optic networks?to new wireless providers as a way of bringing greater diversity to the Japanese Web. For his part, Kanda, the frustrated candidate, agrees that the pressure to reform the outdated election law is growing by the day. Given his own experience, however, he's not holding his breath.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on November 01, 2008 (boomark / email).