Zoo Station

The Financial Times has a fascinating story on how Bahraini activists are using Google Earth to highlight the excesses of the royal family and pushing for greater economic equality. True to form, the government reacted by banning Google Earth, which of course led to widespread publicity for the software and ever-greater use of the tool to map land-holdings in Bahrain.

When Google updated its images of Bahrain to higher definition, cyber-activists seized on the view it gave of estates and private islands belonging to the ruling al-Khalifa family to highlight the inequity of land distribution in the tiny Gulf kingdom.
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Opposition activists claim that 80 per cent of the island has been carved up between royals and other private landlords, while much of the rest of the population faces an acute housing shortage.
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Mahmood al-Yousif, a businessman whose political chat and blog site Mahmood’s Den is among Bahrain’s most popular, says that in the tense run-up to the polls, few Bahrainis have not surfed over the contours of their kingdom, comparing vast royal palaces, marinas and golf courses with crowded Shia villages nearby, where unemployment is rife and services meagre.

For those with insufficient bandwidth to access Google Earth, a PDF file with dozens of downloaded images of royal estates has been circulated anonymously by e-mail. Mr Yousif, among others, initially encouraged web users to post images on photo-sharing websites. “Some of the palaces take up more space than three or four villages nearby and block access to the sea for fishermen. People knew this already. But they never saw it. All they saw were the surrounding walls,” said Mr Yousif, who is seen in Bahrain as the grandfather of its blogging community.

In many ways, this removal of information asymmetries will end up being one of Google's great contributions to modern society, especially as more ideas are articulated in the public realm which make use of Google's awesome search prowess to reduce the asymmetries between the citizenry and the government. Case in point being Barack Obama's superb idea of a Google for Government to account for ALL government expenditure (thanks, Amit).