Just sayin'

What Freedom House data and others tell us

IMHO 1995 is the modern Year Zero for the internet.

Web browsers had been around for a while. People with little technical knowledge, and less patience, could now do interesting and useful things online without having first to memorise or enter arcane, often lengthy commands or a series of them. Mistype a single letter or digit and you usually had to start all over again.

Then in 1995 Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer into Windows. A shrewd business move. To most users it now looked and felt as though the browser was “free” but probably more to the point, it was simply there. You didn’t have to go looking for it, download it, or configure it. You may not even have known about it before you turned on your new PC for the first time.

A few mouse-clicks on intuitive icons took you to lots more “free” stuff. Internet usage started to take off in a classic hockey-stick curve. Faster, cheaper connectivity and ever-prettier, ever-cheaper hardware fed what seemed an unstoppable virtuous circle.

The rhetoric of the age was breathless: the world was flattening, hierarchies dissolving, “information wants to be free,” tyrants and monopolies would crumble.

The Day of Liberation was at hand.

It wasn’t.

But we had all inhaled.

Or drank the Kool-Aid. That’s a nod to the non-smokers among us.

How has it gone?

If it isn’t obvious, I chose 1995 as the baseline only because of the Internet Explorer thing. 1995 otherwise bears no particular relation to the chronology of techno-liberation, actual or imagined. Maybe if I had chosen a different timeline a different picture would emerge, but I doubt it. Compared with 536 CE practically everything looks better.

Freedom House is on the case

Since 1941 Freedom House has been keeping an eye on things.

In 1973 it introduced three broad but widely accepted categories of countries: Free, Partly Free, and Not Free.

Here are their definitions

Free

Freedom House rates a country as “Free” when it guarantees broad political rights and civil liberties in law and practice. Elections are genuinely free and fair, opposition parties can campaign and transitions of power occur peacefully. There is freedom of expression, association, and belief, an independent judiciary, and limited corruption. The state generally protects the Rule of Law and allows citizens to form organisations which participate in civic life without interference.

(Typical examples in 2025: Sweden, Canada, Japan, Uruguay.)

Not free

A “Not Free” state severely restricts both political rights and civil liberties. Power is concentrated in the hands of an autocrat, the military, or single party. Elections, if any, are non-competitive or fraudulent. Censorship, surveillance, arbitrary detention, and persecution of critics are common. The Rule of Law is absent or subordinate to political control.

(Examples: China, North Korea, Syria, Turkmenistan.)

One might quibble with aspects or the completeness of the Freedom House definitions, but let’s accept the broad sweep for now.

Scores on the boards

Using Freedom House data as the yardstick, today there are six more “Not Free” countries than there were in 1995 (1995: 53 / 191; 2025: 59 / 195).

That’s a rise from about 27.7 % to 30.3 % of countries.

In population terms, roughly 40 % of people live under “Not Free” conditions today, compared with 39 % in 1995.

In a similar vein, V-Dem’s broader typology finds autocracies (91) now outnumber democracies (88). The headline of that report says it all:

“Autocracies outnumber democracies for the first time in 20 years.”

Freedom House said something similar

“Global freedom declined for the 19th consecutive year in 2024”

The picture both organizations project is depressingly consistent. And that 20 years coincides almost entirely with the massive expansion of the internet.

Well done us. Not.

Btw taking “Partly Free” into account does not materially change anything very much which is why I left it out, but you can look for yourself. Obviously.

Way too simplistic

Only a complete idiot would argue the internet and its associated digital technologies are the only or principal reason why “Free” has shrunk while “Not Free” and autocracies have increased.

But equally, nobody can any longer claim the internet overcame or could yet overcome all obstacles to spread freedom, justice, truth and sweetness and light because it is, inherently and unambiguously, a liberation technology.

I am not suggesting such starry-eyed, utopian views about the internet are anything like as widespread as they once were. Among the wider population it is almost certainly the exact opposite.

But the Kumbaya, bottom-up, self-regulation, one world, one internet model is still an Article of Faith for adherents of the ole’ time religion, many of whom still hold sway in several of what pass for internet governance bodies.

Meanwhile in the real-world

Old monopolies have been replaced by new ones and, as we have seen, tyrants adapted quickly. Even governments in countries classed as “Free” occasionally stepped over the line in our new digital world, but because they retained a strong commitment to the Rule of Law — that’s why they were classed as “Free” in the first place — they were usually dragged back into compliance by independent courts.

Note that. “Independent courts” not Silicon Valley or any of its institutional, weaponised co-dependant offshoots.

On that happy note.