How did we have revolutions before Twitter? It seems like democracy is an inevitable result of Internet access, something that officials in Iran and China are now both fumbling with at their peril. As we watch both nations' ham-handed efforts at cramming the Internet genie back into the bottle, it's obvious that connected people are empowered people. If we consider democracy to be a priority in the U.S., we have to make connectivity a priority, too.

The most spectacular example of Internet empowerment at the moment is in Iran. Protesters against the recent election results have been organizing and publicizing themselves on Twitter, even as the Iranian government keeps trying to whack this democratic mole: first shutting down text messaging, then blocking some IP addresses, then trying to hunt down individual Tweeters.

Twitter has become such a critical tool in Iran that the U.S. State Department asked the company to delay some planned downtime because taking Twitter offline might have a political effect.

One major key here is the combination of Internet tools and mobile phones. Mobile Internet means that people can communicate while actually out on the street—it pulls democracy out from behind closed doors. And mobile services like Twitter have many points of access, so they're hard to block.

This isn't the first 'Internet revolution,' of course. Filipinos, famously, overthrew their government way back in 2001 with the help of text messaging. And earlier this year, Moldovans used Twitter to help organize anti-government protests. Net-powered democracy is a slowly growing snowball, not something appearing out of thin air.

The Chinese government, meanwhile, seems to be starting to despair about its ability to stop citizens from chatting about gay people and Falun Gong. While they have a massive crew of censors scouring the Chinese Net for ungoodspeak, a collection of 162 million blogs written by 298 million Web users (according to the AP) is too massive for even the Chinese government's censorial prowess.—Next: Green Dam >