The Tragedy of Ethiopia's Internet

Former American diplomats, current members of Ethiopia’s intelligence agency, and foreign policy experts all said that the Ethiopian government is afraid of dissident views spreading online, and has crafted its intelligence service, telecommunication sector, and legal codes to stamp out digital dissent. Perhaps the foremost victim of the country’s Internet crusade is young Nafkot Nega, who believes his father is a terrorist because he’s a journalist.

The prohibitive factors that cause Ethiopia’s digital divide are straightforward. The monopoly on Internet access has made it prohibitively expensive for many citizens to get online. Routine service outages make connections unreliable. And for those Ethiopians who do manage to access the Internet, there is little content available in the local language of Amharic. Whether these barriers to Internet access are the intended result of a system designed to limit the spread of information, or the unintentional byproduct of a monopolistic cash cow is about as murky as the country’s dealings in cyber-espionage. “Ethiopia wants to maintain as much control as possible over the Internet so that it can prevent internal comments that are critical of government policies and minimize access to critical comments originating outside Ethiopia,” said David Shinn, the former American ambassador to Ethiopia. A member of the Information Network Security Agency, one of Ethiopia’s intelligence agencies, also said that the monopoly purposefully limited Internet access to preserve security in the country.