Merge pull request #806 from gnomevan/patch-75

Update too long link and broken cite 2-0-information-technology-and-d…

contents/english/2-0-information-technology-and-democracy-a-widening-gulf.md

@@ -98,11 +98,12 @@ While the original internet was almost entirely developed by the public and acad
 This lack of public sector engagement with technology extends beyond research and development to deployment, adoption, and facilitation.  The easiest areas to measure this are the quality and availability of digital connectivity and education.  Here the data are somewhat mixed, as many high-functioning democracies (such as the Scandinavian countries) have high quality and high availability internet.  But it is striking that leading authoritarian regimes dramatically outperform democracies at similar development levels, especially in the latest connectivity technology.  For example, according to Speedtest.net, the PRC ranks 16th in internet speeds in the world, while only 72nd in income per head; Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies similarly punch above their weight[^DigitalDisconnect].   Performance on 5G, the latest generation of mobile connectivity, is more dramatic: a range of surveys find Saudi Arabia and the PRC consistently in the top 10 best-covered jurisdictions by 5G, far above their income levels.
 
 More central to the heart of governmental responsibility in democracies, however, is the digitization of public services. Many middle-income and wealthy democracies invest less in e-government compared to authoritarian counterparts. The UN e-government development index (EGDI) is a composite measure of three important dimensions of e-government, namely: provision of online services, telecommunication connectivity, and human capital. In 2022, several authoritarian governments ranked highly, including UAE (13th), Kazakhstan  (28th), and Saudia Arabia  (31st), ahead of many democracies including notably, Canada (32nd), Italy (37th), Brazil (49th), and Mexico (62nd).[^EGDI]
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 [^EGDI]:_United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs_. E-Government Knowledge Database, 2022 available at https://publicadministration.un.org/egovkb/Data-Center
 
 Digitization of conventional public services is perhaps the least ambitious dimension along which one might expect democracies to advance in adopting technology.  Technology has redefined what services are relevant and in these novel areas, democratic governments have almost entirely failed to keep up with changing times.  Where once government-provided postal services and public libraries were the backbone of democratic communication and knowledge circulation, today most communication flows through social media and search engines.  Where once most public gatherings took place in parks and literal public squares, today it is almost a cliché that the public square has moved online.  Yet democratic countries have almost entirely ignored the need to provide and support digital public services.  While privately-owned Twitter is the target of constant abuse by public figures, its most important competitor, the non-profits [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/)  and the open [Activity Pub](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/) standard on which it runs have received a paltry few hundreds of thousands of dollars in public support, running instead on Patreon donations.[^Mastodonsupport]  More broadly, open source software and other commons-based public goods like Wikipedia have become critical public resources in the digital age; yet governments have consistently failed to support them and have even discriminated against them relative to other charities (for example, open source software providers generally cannot be tax-exempt charities).  While authoritarian regimes [plow ahead](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/cbdctracker/) with plans for Central Bank Digital Currencies, most democratic countries are only beginning explorations.
 
-[^Mastodonsupport]: Sara Perez, "Amid Twitter chaos, Mastodon grew donations 488% in 2022, reached 1.8M monthly active users", *Tech Crunch*, October 2, 2023 at  https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/02/amid-twitter-chaos-mastodon-grew-donations-488-in-2022-reached-1-8m-monthly-active-users/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAB4elMpT6Z4bRh0CgGahv6StNV0XxSqowWdySLswyxLtHeVqB_vtEy26USK2og_vDxXf02LLxZMR-vLz1iHo9IJ5lX8yiJrVLNdyReDPWVnFG-slFZv3Jdf4KK_EYXVkQksyWSniRIVgdaHf6HHLIfnHVh25XloIecCX760j8hcQ#:~:text=But%20unlike%20investor%2Dbacked%20startups,had%20at%20year%2Dend%202021.
+[^Mastodonsupport]: Sara Perez, "Amid Twitter chaos, Mastodon grew donations 488% in 2022, reached 1.8M monthly active users", *Tech Crunch*, October 2, 2023 at https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/02/amid-twitter-chaos-mastodon-grew-donations-488-in-2022-reached-1-8m-monthly-active-users/)
 
 Most ambitiously, democracies could, as so many autocracies have been doing, help facilitate radical experiments with how technologies could reshape social structures.  Yet, here again, democracy seems so often to stand in the way rather than facilitate such experimentation.  The PRC government has built cities and reimagined regulations to facilitate driverless cars, such as Shenzhen, and has more broadly built a detailed national technology strategy covering nearly every aspect of policy, regulation and investment.[^TechInvestmentPRC]  Saudi Arabia is busy building a new smart city in the desert, Neom, to showcase a range of green and smart city technology, while even the most modest localized projects in democratic countries, such as Google’s Sidewalk Labs, have been swamped by local opposition.[^Sideways]