Morozov is absolutely right to point out that other countries—not in the set analyzed in Digital Origins—might reveal different paths toward or away from democratic government. But a quick look at some of the examples shows that they do not directly conflict with my argument that the proliferation of consumer electronics in countries with an active civil society and limited resource wealth seems to come with democratic consequences. China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela are often offered as examples of how a tough regime can use digital media to oppress their citizens.

Understanding political trends in these countries is an important project on its own. But as cases, they do not contribute much to our understanding of how technology proliferation advances democratic norms and practices because they are not directly relevant. They are important in that large numbers of people suffer under their authoritarian rule. China has effectively built its own Internet, with choke points, “joint ventures” that constrain private technology partners, and peculiar telecommunications standards that privilege domestic firms and allow easy access by national security agencies. The Chinese use hobbled search engines, and Chinese youth do not use Facebook; they use QQ. Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela have prominent civil society groups, but are countries where ruling elites built distinct cultures of technology use. Iran and Saudi Arabia have created a culture of fear and self-censorship around technology use, while Russia and Venezuela have effectively redesigned how all media works domestically. If anything, these cases reveal that the best way for an authoritarian government to maintain control is to not connect to global networks, import consumer electronics, or work on raising the informational sophistication of their citizenry. Russia and Venezuela are countries that over the last decade have worked to unplug their domestic media system from global information networks: the nationalization of media services, the assassination of journalists, and active surveillance will discourage the political uses of digital media. These cases do not contradict the finding that once a country's information infrastructure—and political culture—is wired up, popular expectations for democracy rise.

Morozov is also correct to point out that there is a political economy to the technology services provided by YouTube, Facebook, and blogging applications. In interesting ways, the behavior of these firms demonstrates that they don't fully appreciate the ways in which their technology services are treated as public information infrastructure by many citizens. These large technology companies design tools for their “users” or “clients.” Yet, in times of crisis, it is “citizens” who put political content into these tools for distribution across their social networks.

Technology firms sometimes act constructively to either serve the public or capture market shares. For example, Google rushed its launch of Speak2Tweet, an application that bypassed Mubarak's attempt to block Twitter use by translating phone messages into text messages. Several tech firms built dedicated portals to allow in-country users to share content. But as Morozov points out, information technologies—and the businesses designing them—do not always do things to support democratization movements. Opposition leaders in countries where political parties are illegal sometimes use pseudonyms to avoid government harassment. But doing so on Facebook is a violation of the company's user agreement, and so the company actually shut down one of the protest-group pages in December. Supporters eventually advocated to have the page reinstated, but the incident demonstrated the way in which businesses such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter may not fully appreciate the way in which their users treat these tools as public information infrastructure, and not just as a cool new application. Whereas Google has signed the Global Network Initiative—a compact for preventing web censorship by authoritarian governments—Facebook has refused. It might be technically possible to require Facebook users in Western countries to use real identities but then to also offer levels of anonymity to people living in dictatorships, but no such feature exists.