WIRED:Landlocked countries like Tajikistan get fast internet connectivity from their neighbours – but there is a down side

EVEN THE most geo-savvy westerners would take a few long moments to find Tajikistan on a map. North of Afghanistan, it sits in the very centre of central Asia, landlocked, mountainous, and poor even by comparison to its neighbours.

Like most former Soviet Republics, it’s not an undeveloped country – it has mineral resources, and infrastructure inherited from its Soviet past. But the region edured chaos after the collapse of the USSR, and has struggled to maintain its shaky economic status as it stepped alone into the post-Soviet, post-industrial world.

In its rural mountainous regions, Tajiks are poor, frequently without jobs (unofficial unemployment rates are about 40 per cent), and largely unable to improve their conditions. A fifth of the population live on less than €2 a day.

They do like their internet though.

I’m sitting in the corner of a conference room in neighbouring Kazakhstan with Mahmod Naimov, a Tajik researcher working for the US non-profit organisation, Irex. Naimov has been travelling across his country to find out exactly how far the internet has penetrated into these remote regions, and what the locals are making of it.

Thanks to foreign aid investment, the cities and mountains of Tajikistan have a scattering of internet centres built for the locals. These are filled with thousands of Tajiks, who travel to access computers and the internet for free or cheaply, often on word of mouth and without formal training.

It’s not easy: the Tajik web consists of a handful of domains, mostly government and official media; some software is translated to the local language, but not all. Most users end up surfing sites in the region’s second language, Russian, in which they are not always fluent. But once they make it out onto the wider internet, Tajiks quickly match the rest of the world in their browsing. Their most popular sites are Google and Yahoo! (the rural types preferring Yahoo! more than their sophisticated city cousins). They look up local laws and medical advice. They get in touch with old friends.

Older Tajiks lost contact with comrades they met in the Soviet army when the USSR broke apart; the Russian equivalents of FriendsReunited and Facebook bring them back together. Over a million Tajiks live abroad, sending home funds to the seven million left behind: the internet maintains those family connections.

Younger Tajiks are more ambitious in their use. Naimov talks about the couple his researchers met who are researching how to build an online shop to expand their local business to an international audience. Others find work abroad using the internet. One pair of friends searched for dancing communities, and gained funding to travel to dance competitions as far away as Dubai.

The rural users are not internet rubes, though – at least, not any more. “There are cheaters on the internet – websites that ask you for money with your job application. The information in the internet is unfiltered, like a basket,” one says.

Not everyone is happy. A university professor in the city complains that Tajikistan already has enough printed literature to keep it going for another decade. “All the information on the internet is useless for harvesting, for example, or metal processing.” And when asked in the country who shouldn’t have the internet, the response is depressing: women. Naimov says that the prejudice against women receiving an education in some areas extends to granting them access to the internet.

He also points out the biggest impending problem for the region’s internet users. Governments in these countries are waking up in their own way to internet use, and not always in a positive way. Other Central Asian countries either block or are considering blocking websites that their rulers view as dangerous.

Kazakhstan has been blocking the popular blogging site LiveJournal for months, and, despite widespread protests by internet users, recently passed a law expanding the state’s pervasive controls on traditional mass media to all “internet resources”, requiring all ISPs to store two years’ worth of personal data for police inspection. In Tajikistan, these regulations have a knock-on effect. Its government looks to the rest of the region for guidance in how to govern the internet, and if Kazakhstan chooses to saddle its internet users with expensive filtering and data collection costs, so will Tajikistan.

There’s a more direct effect too: landlocked countries like Naimov’s get their fast internet connectivity from their neighbours. That means that, if they get their internet from Iran, they’ll receive Iran’s filtered internet; if they get it from Kazakhstan, the Kazakh censors will control what Maimov’s internet users see. Even Chinese filtering practices have effected the region’s internet connectivity.

Central Asia has had a long history of being the football in the “great game” of larger neighbouring powers. Now, with its own independence, and access to a global, decentralized resource like the internet, the region has an even chance of access to the knowledge that drives so much of the 21st century economy. But if its more developed neighbours insist on meddling with the data that pass through this new silk road, the internet-savvy citizens of Tajikistan risk being handed a diluted, second-hand, slow and expensive version of the free internet that the West profits from.