Book Review: <i>Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace</i> , by Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain

Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace. Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. $48 hbk. $24 pbk. 432 pp.Reviewed by: James F. Scotton, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA DOI: 10.1177/1077699013506351Access Contested is the third volume in the editors' series (Access Denied, 2008; Access Controlled, 2010). Deibert and Rohozinski are at the University of Toronto while Palfrey and Zittrain are at Harvard. With expertise in political science, computer science, and law, they are considered by many to be the leading team in monitoring cyberspace battles of freedom versus control. This volume focuses on Asia. The editors believe the shift in cyberspace population to the South and the East in the world can make this the crucial area for the battle over who controls the Internet.It is a dense, fact-filled book that will require some serious attention to get through. Overall, it will tend to serve more as a resource for researchers than a reader even for a graduate seminar. The research is impressive with the China chapter alone having 151 notes, most of them quite recent and especially helpful to researchers trying to track down online government and other sources on these Internet topics. The writing is on the whole clear, but in some chapters, the details become a bit overwhelming to a reader trying to grasp the general sense of a chapter.The editors contribute two general chapters in which they suggest who controls the Internet is on the brink of being decided. The battle is between state sovereignty every- where (in this case in Asia) and the generally privately owned Internet infrastructure. The editors see corporate entities such as Google inevitably lining up with individual Internet users because it is the only way either can have any control in the face of steadily increasing government pressures.There are eight essays on Internet control struggles, some focused on individual countries (two on Malaysia, none on India). There are ten additional chapters on indi- vidual countries (China and South Korea are included but nothing found even in the Index on Japan). These chapters compare countries on the extent of government Internet filtering and whether policies are transparent and consistent. The editors said the countries included are those where they believed there was the most to learn about Internet filtering by authorities.The editors point out that to the extent that governments can control the Internet they can make sure that their own citizens will experience a different view of the world. Governments have been trying to isolate their citizens from critical outside views for centuries, of course, but the editors suggest that increasing dependence on the Internet is making it easier for authorities to do this. …

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