The Economic Consequences of Internet Censorship
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Hmaidi, Antonia
Internet censorship today is widespread, both by governments and by private entities. Much of the discussion so far has focused on political and social effects of this censorship. However, censorship also has a clear effect on the economic structure of society that has not been explored.
 A talk would be good, right? Do you want to give a talk? Okay, guys, well, I found someone who's willing to give a talk. That is most excellent. So, if you ever ask yourself, I've got this big regime and I'm rolling out internet censorship. What does my economy do? There are people in here asking that question, right? There's always someone at Congress who's asking some question. Well, you came to the right place and as part of her PhD thesis work, Tony is going to answer that question, hopefully, to a satisfactory point. Please give a warm round of applause. Okay, thanks everyone for being here. I hope you can all hear me correctly. And I'm glad to be here and to be presenting some part of my thesis today. Now, this is ongoing work, so I'm really grateful for any kind of feedback that you guys would have. And I'm really only presenting this as kind of a first try because when I looked at the topic of internet censorship and what that could mean for an economy, I really didn't find anything academic. And I was quite surprised. It seemed like a very obvious question to me because I was looking mostly at China at the beginning. And I read a lot of newspaper articles and I talked to a lot of businessmen who told me, you know, China is doing business in China is very difficult and I think China is really holding itself back by having this big censorship thing going. But no one really looked into how it is holding itself back or if it is even holding itself back. So there is really very, very little research. And we don't even have an agreement among economists or business studies people about what impact the internet has on the economy. So if you want to ask, so what does internet censorship do to an economy? It seems pretty obvious to first ask, what does the internet do to an economy? And we don't even know that. That was quite surprising to me and I'm going to be talking about the reasons for that a little bit later on. But in general, I was thinking of a research question to ask, which for me is, does internet censorship reduce economic welfare? Not all of you are economists, so some of you might think of welfare more as the transfer payments that a state gives to its poorer people. But for economists, economic welfare is defined as the consumer and producer surplus. So basically the difference between what something costs and what you can sell it for is the producer surplus. The difference between what you would be willing to pay and what you're actually paying is your consumer surplus. Now let's assume I have a laptop and I bought this and I would have been willing to pay 1500 euros for this laptop because I think it's a very good product, it's by Lenovo that makes good laptops, but I actually got it for like 800 or 900 euros. That would mean my personal consumer surplus is something like 600 or 700 euros. And if we add up everyone's individual consumer surplus, we get the economic welfare surplus. So first, I was trying to figure out what does the internet mean for the economy and I'm sad that there is really no good agreement on that. Now a very crude measure that I found is how much does the internet economy contribute to GDP? Now what is the internet economy? It wasn't very clear in the research that I've read. It seems to be sort of online retail and possibly some other internet enabled services. Possibly, but not necessarily, internet advertisement revenue is reflected in this, but because it was BCG, which is a big consulting agency that basically published this research, they weren't very diligent about their methods basically. So we can see, well, it seems that the UK has a pretty big part of internet economy as part of GDP. That's probably mostly because of online retail, which is bigger in the UK than in most other countries we look at. And we see that there is a small difference between developed and developing market averages when looking only at the G20 countries. But this seems like a very dissatisfactory answer because first of all, I don't know the methods, so I can't really say whether this is actually good. And secondly, GDP is actually not a good measure for what we're trying to measure because a lot of the stuff that the internet creates, a lot of the value the internet creates, isn't captured by GDP at all. One example is free online courses. Most of the online courses you can take on the web are actually free, and most of them are not ad enabled, so most of them don't really have advertisements in the general sense. So classical economics basically says, well, they don't really create any value, but if you've ever taken one of these online courses and maybe you've been lucky and took a good one, you would actually, I would say that some of the courses I took, they created some value for me. So one of the ways to look at this is actually to think about time as something that has opportunity cost. So if I'm spending my time doing this online course, I'm not spending it, for example, earning money. I'm also not spending it doing something leisurely that is fun for me. And these guys, Brinn-Jolfsen, I'm sorry, I don't know how to pronounce it exactly, he sounds Swedish, possibly, and oh, in 2012, they tried to get an idea of how much consumer surplus these online courses actually create, which isn't at all reflected in the GDP. And you see that in some models, it would be 5% of GDP for these online courses alone, even if we take their most conservative model, which is $4.18 billion on average for the years to 2011. That's still a pretty significant chunk of economic welfare that's somehow being created that is not reflected in GDP, because GDP is only stuff that you actually pay money for. Another example that we might think of is Wikipedia. Now, Wikipedia has a certain cost of operating, obviously the servers and stuff, but because most people contributing to Wikipedia are actually volunteers, the cost of operating does not really reflect the true value Wikipedia creates. And one of the, even if you don't want to say, even if you don't agree that money, that time has opportunity cost, what about the money that you don't spend on encyclopedias? How many of you guys have encyclopedias at home? Okay, that's more than I expected. How many of you guys have recent encyclopedias at home? That's a little less. This is kind of more what I was expecting. And now, my family also, we also have an encyclopedia at home. I think it's from 1985 or something. And before this encyclopedia, we would regularly update an encyclopedia, we would regularly go out and buy a new encyclopedia, because knowledge changed, obviously. But ever since, probably 1990, we just didn't bother. So, assuming an encyclopedia might, like a physical book, might cost 100 euros. And assuming sort of two thirds of all households in Germany have had an encyclopedia at one point. We're looking at 13 million households at this point. Now, you don't buy an encyclopedia every year, but you might buy it every 10 years. So, in order to simplify this, we can say, every year, 1.3 million households buy an encyclopedia, on average. 1.3 million times 100 euros. So, we're at 130 million euros of economic welfare, of something that people were willing to spend money for, that they're not spending money for anymore, because of Wikipedia. Because now that we have Wikipedia, most of the encyclopedias aren't actually useful for us anymore. Because the knowledge that we have, the knowledge that they would have, would be outdated very, very soon. And Wikipedia tends to be more up to date. Well, that was from the consumer side. But what about the business side? There's a lot of research on whether the internet actually increases productivity for businesses or not. Well, I don't really want to go into that debate, because it's a really long, tedious debate that is kind of focused on, well, you did this method wrong, or you did this wrong, and, well, I don't think your argument makes sense. So, it's very, I don't like this kind of debate. I really like to go deeper in things. But one of the things that I found was that a lot of businesses do rely on the internet by now. Now, we can see on this graph that most firms, overall about 70% of firms, actually use the email to communicate. Now, email obviously only works if you have internet, so they need some sort of access to internet in order for their current business model to work. Now, this was just some short ideas on sort of what can the internet mean for the economy, and now I want to talk about internet censorship just a little bit. Now, I'm not a censorship expert. I'm just someone who read a lot of papers about it and who was very interested in what kind of effects this has beyond sort of the obvious people don't have access to political information. So, first, the definition. Internet censorship is the control of suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the internet and acted by regulators or on their own initiative. Now, when trying to conceptualize internet censorship, for me personally, there's two dimensions that are very important. One is how targeted is this internet censorship? Now, you could, in theory, basically have internet censorship that is very, very targeted, which you see in some cases, or you can have censorship that isn't targeted at all. Like in Egypt, they just decided to close the internet down basically for a day. That isn't very targeted censorship, obviously. The other thing to look at is how widespread is it? If you are a business or if you're a normal consumer, how probable is it that you would come something that's censored? Now, obviously, if you're in China, it's a lot more probable that you would try to access something that's censored than if you were in Germany, even though Germany also does some censorship. The way I like to conceptualize it is to be kind of on a continuum. I don't say, well, either there's censorship or there isn't censorship. What I'm trying to say is censorship has a big spectrum of things that can happen. Now, these are some types of internet censorship that have different sort of implications. I don't want to go through them in detail because I think we've heard some really interesting talks on internet censorship already. This is kind of interesting or important for the model that I'm trying to build. But before trying to build my model, first, some more motivation. I was trying to look at, well, is there any evidence that it would have an economic impact? There actually is a study that's conducted by a sort of lobbying organization. Obviously, it should be taken with a grain of salt. But it is quite interesting and it shows that there seems to be a correlation between freedom and how good the economic impact of internet is. This is just a simple correlation. You can see that there's a pretty good line going through it. They did do some controlling for GDP per capita, so for development level. But it still seems quite rudimentary, to be honest. The data that they use is quite bad because it is very, very... It's just not finely granular enough. And a lot of it is kind of someone's rating. So how do you think the economic... How do you think internet impacts the economy in this country? And then this is the data that they use to some degree. So it seemed very... It didn't really seem like a good final answer. So I'm trying to set up my own model. And in my model, I have a government that chooses the type of censorship. And for this type of censorship that it chooses, it pays a cost. Because we all know censorship can be very expensive. And in my model for now, the only type of expenses that I calculate are actual manpower and technology expenses. I don't calculate reputation expenses at this point. There are firms in N industries. Now this N is kind of not a fixed number, but instead is a number that can fluctuate, depending on the kind of country I'm trying to model. And these industries distinguish themselves by their information intensity, or what I like to call information intensity. Basically, I look at information as a commodity. And what I'm trying to decide, or the way I distinguish different kinds of industry, is how important is information as a commodity, as opposed to other kinds of commodities that are important for this industry. So let's look at information intensity equals zero. If information as a commodity really isn't important, especially sort of convient information, transmitted information, we can think of traditional agriculture. Now I know today's agriculture tends to be large scale, and there's a lot of technology involved. But if you look at very traditional agriculture, you might see happening in some parts of Africa, there usually is very, very little information transmission involved. And most of the information transmission that is involved is actually mostly through word of mouth. So that would be a case of information intensity of very close to zero. And then if we look at information intensity of one, where basically the internet is the most, or information is the most important commodity, internet businesses themselves would obviously qualify here, sorry. Like let's look at Facebook and other kinds of businesses like this. And in between we have sort of industrial companies in the modern world. Now if we're closer to the zero end of the spectrum, we might be at 0.2, 0.3, something like this. We might be in the garment, in traditional garment factories. They do have information needs. They get their cuts and stuff from the internet by now or from by email. But once they have them, they basically stay the same for a couple of weeks or months. So there's a very low information requirement. On the other side, closer to 0.8 or something like that, we have high tech, especially software manufacturing, so to speak. Information and being able to transmit this information is very important. In between we might look at traditional industrial companies like automobile manufacturing that might be somewhere in between. And before the game or before, or at the first run of the model, service level and globalization level are randomly distributed. The information intensity of industries is also kind of randomly distributed, but not in a true random fashion. Because when looking in the wild, what kind of economies exist, most of the information intensity of one industry is kind of correlated with information intensities of other industries in this country. Like in Germany, we were very known for a certain type of industry that we have quite a lot of, which is manufacturing, very high technology manufacturing. So we have more industries in this area, but we have less traditional agriculture, for example. So having a true random distribution wouldn't work. In addition, the service level and the globalization level are randomly distributed as kind of external variables. Obviously, this is a simplification, because I can't really start at the beginning. Like, I can't say, oh, well, I'll start, I don't know, 2000 before Christ and I'll give a very blank economy and then something happens and something happens and something happens, that's just not realistic. So in order to get a better idea of what happens with different types of economies, what I'm doing is I'm running this game or this model again and again, and having these random parameters basically changed every time. So on average, there should be reusable results. Now, what this is actually missing is the consumer as a laborer. So I don't really have labor reflected in here. A more complete model would have that reflected, but it's not the most interesting aspect of my model. So I'm not presenting this here, basically. Now, let's look at what this would mean for firms. In my model, what kind of things would I expect, thinking through it logically, which is always the first step when trying to model something. First of all, if we have an information intensity of something greater than zero, but smaller than one, because the information intensity being close to one is kind of a special case that I'll be talking about later on. Internet censorship increases the cost and uncertainty of information, and of course, that is more important. The more important information is for this certain industry. So for a traditional garment factory, internet censorship might be a lot less important than for a microconductor or semiconductor factory that has to receive new blueprints every day or every month or something like that. The second thing is, the more globalized the economy as a whole is, the more costly internet censorship will be. Similar reasoning. And another thing for firms is, the less focused the censorship, the higher the cost. Now, this assumes that the censorship or the goal of censorship usually isn't to turn down firms or to make sure that firms don't succeed. So if censorship is very focused, firms tend to be affected less, which makes their associated cost less. Now, of course, we can argue, well, firms can circumvent censorship, and they can do that for sure, but it is expensive to do that. If you've ever tried a VPN in China, for example, first buying the VPN is expensive, then having someone sort of make sure that the VPN works is expensive, every couple of months you need to change it because the Chinese government decides, well, this VPN shouldn't work anymore. So it's a very expensive and uncertain thing, really. Now, for firms in information intensity one, it obviously also increases the cost of operating. Now, some of these firms actually carry out some censorship for governments. We have seen that happening more recently. But there might actually be some firms that have a relative advantage, especially domestic firms often have a relative advantage due to the censorship, because they know the regulators better, they know how to deal with it, they might have less need to circumvent, actually, and even if they do need to circumvent, it's easier for them because they speak the language and so on. This is actually a special case that I'll be talking about a little bit later as well. For the government, I've said that censorship is costly, but moreover, the more targeted and accurate censorship is, the more manpower and technology intensive it actually is. This is a finding by Labor Night and all in a research paper. I think they're electrical engineers and they calculated through different types of censorship and how expensive it would be to scale them up. So that is actually a really interesting finding because it shows that for governments, having less targeted censorship is less costly, but this is the kind of censorship that is actually most affecting in a negative way to firms in an economy. So that's not a result that we would really want because the incentives don't line up in that way. Economists love to talk about incentives, obviously. Now, for consumers, they would obviously get less benefits through the internet, the benefits that I've talked about before, and also businesses often pass on the cost to consumers. Now, however, some countries still benefit from internet censorship. I've talked mostly about why it's costly to do it, and I think it is costly in most cases, but developing countries that start out at low service and low globalization levels usually have in these kind of situations internet censorship has less of an impact, less of a negative impact, and censorship can actually act as protectionism. In information intensive industries, governments can use this kind of censorship to push domestic industries and enable catch-up growth. Now, there are a couple of further prerequisites. First of all, the country needs to be large enough so that these information intensive industries have a domestic market as well, obviously. And then also only targeted censorship can serve as protectionism. The only other way would be if you decided on a domestic internet and basically closed your entire internet off to the world, which is kind of difficult. But what about the long-term effects of that? Would they still be positive for the government? Now, I'm using positive in a very sort of something that should be taken with a grain of salt, obviously. And what I did is I looked at China. Obviously, I'm a China watcher, so I'm really interested in China, and this is kind of where my interest started. And I'm really trying to find a framework where China isn't the exception, but instead China kind of fits into the model. What we see is the Chinese government has outsourced much of its censorship to these internet companies. Baidu, Sina, Weibo, Tencent probably would not exist by now, actually, if the censorship didn't exist. And what we actually see now is that WeChat, for example, is going global. It has more functionality than WhatsApp, and they're trying to get out. But the censorship, as I'll be talking about later on a little bit, the censorship is starting to be a problem for these companies that used to benefit. There's some things about Chinese, about how the character of Chinese internet censorship is relevant here, and what about the future? Now, first, it's difficult to innovate with this kind of censorship, and this kind of insular education that we see also makes innovation, real innovation, very difficult. In China, for example, GitHub is blocked most of the time. That makes collaborating, especially in coding environments, very, very hard. Second, we see more global internet-enabled supply chains in the world. So if we have these global internet-enabled supply chains, having internet censorship turns out to be more of a disadvantage, the more globalized these supply chains actually become. And information becomes the most important commodity all throughout China. Now, this, of course, also makes internet censorship more costly for the economy. What about possible positives? So what could work in the Chinese government's favor? First, the Chinese internet is actually pretty attractive to most people. Most people don't try to go outside. They don't even know that they can't. They just don't want to do it. Second, the internet of things where machines communicate with each other doesn't need to be affected, because most of the censorship that we see happening could be reworked in a way that doesn't affect machine-to-machine communication, and that wouldn't be a problem for what the censorship intends to do, which is sort of suppressed political opposition. And third, the government wants an economy more focused on domestic consumption, so if they want to do this, then censorship might actually be good for that. Now, for me, what I found out when doing this research is first, standard economic models really aren't suited for this kind of question, because they tend to use GDP, and I've told you why GDP really is not a good measure for that. Second, the next step that I'll be doing is agent-based modeling, but I would really like to feed my models with some reliable data, and I can't really find any of that. I can find some data going back a couple of years, unlike is there censorship, is there no censorship, but I can't really find any good data that distinguishes between different types of censorship, and that would be really important for the kind of research that I really want to carry out in the future. Thank you, guys. If you have questions, you can ask now, or you can come to me later. You can, of course, also send me an email. I'm always happy to talk about this topic. Thank you very much for this talk. We have six microphones at the floor level here, so if you have questions, we have a very brief amount of time. Please line up at the microphones. We have microphone number two over here. I want to mention one thing. I've always been talking about China censorship. The censorship applies to China mainland, so it's not Hong Kong and not Taiwan. And one question I want to ask is, what do you think about productivity of work? So, for example, if you shut down Facebook, do you think this would increase working productivity? That's a really interesting question and something that I haven't seen anywhere in literature. There is a big literature discussion about what the internet is such means for productivity, and there's kind of both ways. Now, one of the things to look at is that just because you shut down Facebook doesn't mean you shut down any sort of social network. And I do think that if people use Facebook and suddenly aren't able to use it anymore, they would probably spend their resources trying to find new ways to access Facebook, which would probably not exactly improve their productivity. Next question from microphone number two. Would it make sense to have a model where firms use information as an input to a production function and then model censorship as a kind of tax on that? That would seem like standard neoclassical microecon 101 stuff. That wouldn't make sense. I've actually looked at this. One of the problems with doing that is that information as a commodity is very difficult to be used in this neoclassical way, because you usually assume that everything is kind of frictionless, and if things are frictionless, then information can't really be a commodity, because you assume that information basically gets transferred immediately and without any sort of censorship. So we can talk about this a little bit later. Maybe you have some ideas that I haven't found yet. It would be interesting. And the next question as well from microphone number two. Going the same direction for GDP is rather defined what is the optimization problem for a government. For your further approaches, what would be the optimization that a government like China does then? If you say, for example, Wikipedia, which leaks out to all over the world, what is the government optimizing then? What I'm looking at is economic welfare as defined as producer and consumer surplus. And I assume that the government's goal is to optimize economic welfare for both producers' consumers and also for itself as a producer and as a consumer. So your criticism is more like you don't have a good proxy using GDP for economic welfare. Yes. I'm afraid we're all out of time. Please give a warm round of applause to Tony..
 A talk would be good, right?  Do you want to give a talk?  Okay, guys, well, I found someone who's willing to give a talk.  That is most excellent.  So, if you ever ask yourself, I've got this big regime  and I'm rolling out internet censorship.  What does my economy do?  There are people in here asking that question, right?  There's always someone at Congress who's asking some question.  Well, you came to the right place and as part of her PhD thesis work,  Tony is going to answer that question, hopefully, to a satisfactory point.  Please give a warm round of applause.  Okay, thanks everyone for being here.  I hope you can all hear me correctly.  And I'm glad to be here and to be presenting some part of my thesis today.  Now, this is ongoing work, so I'm really grateful for any kind of feedback that you guys would have.  And I'm really only presenting this as kind of a first try because when I looked at the topic of internet censorship  and what that could mean for an economy, I really didn't find anything academic.  And I was quite surprised.  It seemed like a very obvious question to me because I was looking mostly at China at the beginning.  And I read a lot of newspaper articles and I talked to a lot of businessmen who told me,  you know, China is doing business in China is very difficult and I think China is really holding itself back  by having this big censorship thing going.  But no one really looked into how it is holding itself back or if it is even holding itself back.  So there is really very, very little research.  And we don't even have an agreement among economists or business studies people about what impact the internet has on the economy.  So if you want to ask, so what does internet censorship do to an economy?  It seems pretty obvious to first ask, what does the internet do to an economy?  And we don't even know that.  That was quite surprising to me and I'm going to be talking about the reasons for that a little bit later on.  But in general, I was thinking of a research question to ask, which for me is,  does internet censorship reduce economic welfare?  Not all of you are economists, so some of you might think of welfare more as the transfer payments that a state gives to its poorer people.  But for economists, economic welfare is defined as the consumer and producer surplus.  So basically the difference between what something costs and what you can sell it for is the producer surplus.  The difference between what you would be willing to pay and what you're actually paying is your consumer surplus.  Now let's assume I have a laptop and I bought this and I would have been willing to pay 1500 euros for this laptop  because I think it's a very good product, it's by Lenovo that makes good laptops,  but I actually got it for like 800 or 900 euros.  That would mean my personal consumer surplus is something like 600 or 700 euros.  And if we add up everyone's individual consumer surplus, we get the economic welfare surplus.  So first, I was trying to figure out what does the internet mean for the economy  and I'm sad that there is really no good agreement on that.  Now a very crude measure that I found is how much does the internet economy contribute to GDP?  Now what is the internet economy?  It wasn't very clear in the research that I've read.  It seems to be sort of online retail and possibly some other internet enabled services.  Possibly, but not necessarily, internet advertisement revenue is reflected in this,  but because it was BCG, which is a big consulting agency that basically published this research,  they weren't very diligent about their methods basically.  So we can see, well, it seems that the UK has a pretty big part of internet economy as part of GDP.  That's probably mostly because of online retail, which is bigger in the UK than in most other countries we look at.  And we see that there is a small difference between developed and developing market averages  when looking only at the G20 countries.  But this seems like a very dissatisfactory answer because first of all, I don't know the methods,  so I can't really say whether this is actually good.  And secondly, GDP is actually not a good measure for what we're trying to measure  because a lot of the stuff that the internet creates, a lot of the value the internet creates,  isn't captured by GDP at all.  One example is free online courses.  Most of the online courses you can take on the web are actually free,  and most of them are not ad enabled, so most of them don't really have advertisements in the general sense.  So classical economics basically says, well, they don't really create any value,  but if you've ever taken one of these online courses and maybe you've been lucky and took a good one,  you would actually, I would say that some of the courses I took, they created some value for me.  So one of the ways to look at this is actually to think about time as something that has opportunity cost.  So if I'm spending my time doing this online course, I'm not spending it, for example, earning money.  I'm also not spending it doing something leisurely that is fun for me.  And these guys, Brinn-Jolfsen, I'm sorry, I don't know how to pronounce it exactly, he sounds Swedish, possibly,  and oh, in 2012, they tried to get an idea of how much consumer surplus these online courses actually create,  which isn't at all reflected in the GDP.  And you see that in some models, it would be 5% of GDP for these online courses alone,  even if we take their most conservative model, which is $4.18 billion on average for the years to 2011.  That's still a pretty significant chunk of economic welfare that's somehow being created that is not reflected in GDP,  because GDP is only stuff that you actually pay money for.  Another example that we might think of is Wikipedia.  Now, Wikipedia has a certain cost of operating, obviously the servers and stuff,  but because most people contributing to Wikipedia are actually volunteers,  the cost of operating does not really reflect the true value Wikipedia creates.  And one of the, even if you don't want to say, even if you don't agree that money, that time has opportunity cost,  what about the money that you don't spend on encyclopedias?  How many of you guys have encyclopedias at home?  Okay, that's more than I expected.  How many of you guys have recent encyclopedias at home?  That's a little less.  This is kind of more what I was expecting.  And now, my family also, we also have an encyclopedia at home.  I think it's from 1985 or something.  And before this encyclopedia, we would regularly update an encyclopedia,  we would regularly go out and buy a new encyclopedia, because knowledge changed, obviously.  But ever since, probably 1990, we just didn't bother.  So, assuming an encyclopedia might, like a physical book, might cost 100 euros.  And assuming sort of two thirds of all households in Germany have had an encyclopedia at one point.  We're looking at 13 million households at this point.  Now, you don't buy an encyclopedia every year, but you might buy it every 10 years.  So, in order to simplify this, we can say,  every year, 1.3 million households buy an encyclopedia, on average.  1.3 million times 100 euros.  So, we're at 130 million euros of economic welfare,  of something that people were willing to spend money for, that they're not spending money for anymore,  because of Wikipedia.  Because now that we have Wikipedia, most of the encyclopedias aren't actually useful for us anymore.  Because the knowledge that we have, the knowledge that they would have, would be outdated very, very soon.  And Wikipedia tends to be more up to date.  Well, that was from the consumer side.  But what about the business side?  There's a lot of research on whether the internet actually increases productivity for businesses or not.  Well, I don't really want to go into that debate, because it's a really long, tedious debate that is kind of focused on,  well, you did this method wrong, or you did this wrong, and, well, I don't think your argument makes sense.  So, it's very, I don't like this kind of debate.  I really like to go deeper in things.  But one of the things that I found was that a lot of businesses do rely on the internet by now.  Now, we can see on this graph that most firms, overall about 70% of firms, actually use the email to communicate.  Now, email obviously only works if you have internet, so they need some sort of access to internet in order for their current business model to work.  Now, this was just some short ideas on sort of what can the internet mean for the economy,  and now I want to talk about internet censorship just a little bit.  Now, I'm not a censorship expert.  I'm just someone who read a lot of papers about it and who was very interested in what kind of effects this has beyond sort of the obvious people don't have access to political information.  So, first, the definition. Internet censorship is the control of suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the internet and acted by regulators or on their own initiative.  Now, when trying to conceptualize internet censorship, for me personally, there's two dimensions that are very important.  One is how targeted is this internet censorship?  Now, you could, in theory, basically have internet censorship that is very, very targeted, which you see in some cases,  or you can have censorship that isn't targeted at all.  Like in Egypt, they just decided to close the internet down basically for a day.  That isn't very targeted censorship, obviously.  The other thing to look at is how widespread is it?  If you are a business or if you're a normal consumer, how probable is it that you would come something that's censored?  Now, obviously, if you're in China, it's a lot more probable that you would try to access something that's censored than if you were in Germany,  even though Germany also does some censorship.  The way I like to conceptualize it is to be kind of on a continuum. I don't say, well, either there's censorship or there isn't censorship.  What I'm trying to say is censorship has a big spectrum of things that can happen.  Now, these are some types of internet censorship that have different sort of implications.  I don't want to go through them in detail because I think we've heard some really interesting talks on internet censorship already.  This is kind of interesting or important for the model that I'm trying to build.  But before trying to build my model, first, some more motivation.  I was trying to look at, well, is there any evidence that it would have an economic impact?  There actually is a study that's conducted by a sort of lobbying organization.  Obviously, it should be taken with a grain of salt.  But it is quite interesting and it shows that there seems to be a correlation between freedom and how good the economic impact of internet is.  This is just a simple correlation. You can see that there's a pretty good line going through it.  They did do some controlling for GDP per capita, so for development level.  But it still seems quite rudimentary, to be honest.  The data that they use is quite bad because it is very, very...  It's just not finely granular enough.  And a lot of it is kind of someone's rating.  So how do you think the economic...  How do you think internet impacts the economy in this country?  And then this is the data that they use to some degree.  So it seemed very...  It didn't really seem like a good final answer.  So I'm trying to set up my own model.  And in my model, I have a government that chooses the type of censorship.  And for this type of censorship that it chooses, it pays a cost.  Because we all know censorship can be very expensive.  And in my model for now, the only type of expenses that I calculate are actual manpower and technology expenses.  I don't calculate reputation expenses at this point.  There are firms in N industries.  Now this N is kind of not a fixed number, but instead is a number that can fluctuate,  depending on the kind of country I'm trying to model.  And these industries distinguish themselves by their information intensity,  or what I like to call information intensity.  Basically, I look at information as a commodity.  And what I'm trying to decide, or the way I distinguish different kinds of industry,  is how important is information as a commodity,  as opposed to other kinds of commodities that are important for this industry.  So let's look at information intensity equals zero.  If information as a commodity really isn't important,  especially sort of convient information, transmitted information,  we can think of traditional agriculture.  Now I know today's agriculture tends to be large scale,  and there's a lot of technology involved.  But if you look at very traditional agriculture,  you might see happening in some parts of Africa,  there usually is very, very little information transmission involved.  And most of the information transmission that is involved is actually mostly through word of mouth.  So that would be a case of information intensity of very close to zero.  And then if we look at information intensity of one,  where basically the internet is the most, or information is the most important commodity,  internet businesses themselves would obviously qualify here, sorry.  Like let's look at Facebook and other kinds of businesses like this.  And in between we have sort of industrial companies in the modern world.  Now if we're closer to the zero end of the spectrum,  we might be at 0.2, 0.3, something like this.  We might be in the garment, in traditional garment factories.  They do have information needs.  They get their cuts and stuff from the internet by now or from by email.  But once they have them, they basically stay the same for a couple of weeks or months.  So there's a very low information requirement.  On the other side, closer to 0.8 or something like that,  we have high tech, especially software manufacturing, so to speak.  Information and being able to transmit this information is very important.  In between we might look at traditional industrial companies like automobile manufacturing  that might be somewhere in between.  And before the game or before, or at the first run of the model,  service level and globalization level are randomly distributed.  The information intensity of industries is also kind of randomly distributed,  but not in a true random fashion.  Because when looking in the wild, what kind of economies exist,  most of the information intensity of one industry is kind of correlated  with information intensities of other industries in this country.  Like in Germany, we were very known for a certain type of industry  that we have quite a lot of, which is manufacturing, very high technology manufacturing.  So we have more industries in this area, but we have less traditional agriculture, for example.  So having a true random distribution wouldn't work.  In addition, the service level and the globalization level are randomly distributed  as kind of external variables.  Obviously, this is a simplification, because I can't really start at the beginning.  Like, I can't say, oh, well, I'll start, I don't know, 2000 before Christ  and I'll give a very blank economy and then something happens and something happens  and something happens, that's just not realistic.  So in order to get a better idea of what happens with different types of economies,  what I'm doing is I'm running this game or this model again and again,  and having these random parameters basically changed every time.  So on average, there should be reusable results.  Now, what this is actually missing is the consumer as a laborer.  So I don't really have labor reflected in here.  A more complete model would have that reflected, but it's not the most interesting aspect of my model.  So I'm not presenting this here, basically.  Now, let's look at what this would mean for firms.  In my model, what kind of things would I expect, thinking through it logically,  which is always the first step when trying to model something.  First of all, if we have an information intensity of something greater than zero,  but smaller than one, because the information intensity being close to one  is kind of a special case that I'll be talking about later on.  Internet censorship increases the cost and uncertainty of information,  and of course, that is more important. The more important information is for this certain industry.  So for a traditional garment factory, internet censorship might be a lot less important  than for a microconductor or semiconductor factory that has to receive new blueprints every day or every month or something like that.  The second thing is, the more globalized the economy as a whole is,  the more costly internet censorship will be.  Similar reasoning.  And another thing for firms is, the less focused the censorship, the higher the cost.  Now, this assumes that the censorship or the goal of censorship usually isn't to turn down firms  or to make sure that firms don't succeed. So if censorship is very focused,  firms tend to be affected less, which makes their associated cost less.  Now, of course, we can argue, well, firms can circumvent censorship, and they can do that for sure,  but it is expensive to do that.  If you've ever tried a VPN in China, for example, first buying the VPN is expensive,  then having someone sort of make sure that the VPN works is expensive,  every couple of months you need to change it because the Chinese government decides,  well, this VPN shouldn't work anymore.  So it's a very expensive and uncertain thing, really.  Now, for firms in information intensity one, it obviously also increases the cost of operating.  Now, some of these firms actually carry out some censorship for governments.  We have seen that happening more recently.  But there might actually be some firms that have a relative advantage,  especially domestic firms often have a relative advantage due to the censorship,  because they know the regulators better, they know how to deal with it,  they might have less need to circumvent, actually,  and even if they do need to circumvent, it's easier for them because they speak the language and so on.  This is actually a special case that I'll be talking about a little bit later as well.  For the government, I've said that censorship is costly, but moreover,  the more targeted and accurate censorship is, the more manpower and technology intensive it actually is.  This is a finding by Labor Night and all in a research paper.  I think they're electrical engineers and they calculated through different types of censorship  and how expensive it would be to scale them up.  So that is actually a really interesting finding because it shows that for governments,  having less targeted censorship is less costly,  but this is the kind of censorship that is actually most affecting in a negative way to firms in an economy.  So that's not a result that we would really want because the incentives don't line up in that way.  Economists love to talk about incentives, obviously.  Now, for consumers, they would obviously get less benefits through the internet,  the benefits that I've talked about before, and also businesses often pass on the cost to consumers.  Now, however, some countries still benefit from internet censorship.  I've talked mostly about why it's costly to do it, and I think it is costly in most cases,  but developing countries that start out at low service and low globalization levels  usually have in these kind of situations internet censorship has less of an impact, less of a negative impact,  and censorship can actually act as protectionism.  In information intensive industries, governments can use this kind of censorship to push domestic industries  and enable catch-up growth.  Now, there are a couple of further prerequisites.  First of all, the country needs to be large enough so that these information intensive industries  have a domestic market as well, obviously.  And then also only targeted censorship can serve as protectionism.  The only other way would be if you decided on a domestic internet  and basically closed your entire internet off to the world, which is kind of difficult.  But what about the long-term effects of that?  Would they still be positive for the government?  Now, I'm using positive in a very sort of something that should be taken with a grain of salt, obviously.  And what I did is I looked at China.  Obviously, I'm a China watcher, so I'm really interested in China,  and this is kind of where my interest started.  And I'm really trying to find a framework where China isn't the exception,  but instead China kind of fits into the model.  What we see is the Chinese government has outsourced much of its censorship to these internet companies.  Baidu, Sina, Weibo, Tencent probably would not exist by now, actually, if the censorship didn't exist.  And what we actually see now is that WeChat, for example, is going global.  It has more functionality than WhatsApp, and they're trying to get out.  But the censorship, as I'll be talking about later on a little bit,  the censorship is starting to be a problem for these companies that used to benefit.  There's some things about Chinese, about how the character of Chinese internet censorship is relevant here,  and what about the future?  Now, first, it's difficult to innovate with this kind of censorship,  and this kind of insular education that we see also makes innovation, real innovation, very difficult.  In China, for example, GitHub is blocked most of the time.  That makes collaborating, especially in coding environments, very, very hard.  Second, we see more global internet-enabled supply chains in the world.  So if we have these global internet-enabled supply chains, having internet censorship turns out to be more of a disadvantage,  the more globalized these supply chains actually become.  And information becomes the most important commodity all throughout China.  Now, this, of course, also makes internet censorship more costly for the economy.  What about possible positives?  So what could work in the Chinese government's favor?  First, the Chinese internet is actually pretty attractive to most people.  Most people don't try to go outside.  They don't even know that they can't.  They just don't want to do it.  Second, the internet of things where machines communicate with each other doesn't need to be affected,  because most of the censorship that we see happening could be reworked in a way that doesn't affect machine-to-machine communication,  and that wouldn't be a problem for what the censorship intends to do, which is sort of suppressed political opposition.  And third, the government wants an economy more focused on domestic consumption,  so if they want to do this, then censorship might actually be good for that.  Now, for me, what I found out when doing this research is first, standard economic models really aren't suited for this kind of question,  because they tend to use GDP, and I've told you why GDP really is not a good measure for that.  Second, the next step that I'll be doing is agent-based modeling,  but I would really like to feed my models with some reliable data, and I can't really find any of that.  I can find some data going back a couple of years,  unlike is there censorship, is there no censorship,  but I can't really find any good data that distinguishes between different types of censorship,  and that would be really important for the kind of research that I really want to carry out in the future.  Thank you, guys. If you have questions, you can ask now, or you can come to me later.  You can, of course, also send me an email. I'm always happy to talk about this topic.  Thank you very much for this talk. We have six microphones at the floor level here,  so if you have questions, we have a very brief amount of time. Please line up at the microphones.  We have microphone number two over here.  I want to mention one thing.  I've always been talking about China censorship. The censorship applies to China mainland,  so it's not Hong Kong and not Taiwan.  And one question I want to ask is, what do you think about productivity of work?  So, for example, if you shut down Facebook, do you think this would increase working productivity?  That's a really interesting question and something that I haven't seen anywhere in literature.  There is a big literature discussion about what the internet is such means for productivity,  and there's kind of both ways.  Now, one of the things to look at is that just because you shut down Facebook doesn't mean you shut down any sort of social network.  And I do think that if people use Facebook and suddenly aren't able to use it anymore,  they would probably spend their resources trying to find new ways to access Facebook,  which would probably not exactly improve their productivity.  Next question from microphone number two.  Would it make sense to have a model where firms use information as an input to a production function  and then model censorship as a kind of tax on that? That would seem like standard neoclassical microecon 101 stuff.  That wouldn't make sense. I've actually looked at this.  One of the problems with doing that is that information as a commodity is very difficult to be used in this neoclassical way,  because you usually assume that everything is kind of frictionless,  and if things are frictionless, then information can't really be a commodity,  because you assume that information basically gets transferred immediately and without any sort of censorship.  So we can talk about this a little bit later.  Maybe you have some ideas that I haven't found yet. It would be interesting.  And the next question as well from microphone number two.  Going the same direction for GDP is rather defined what is the optimization problem for a government.  For your further approaches, what would be the optimization that a government like China does then?  If you say, for example, Wikipedia, which leaks out to all over the world, what is the government optimizing then?  What I'm looking at is economic welfare as defined as producer and consumer surplus.  And I assume that the government's goal is to optimize economic welfare for both producers' consumers and also for itself as a producer and as a consumer.  So your criticism is more like you don't have a good proxy using GDP for economic welfare.  Yes.  I'm afraid we're all out of time. Please give a warm round of applause to Tony. .
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