When news broke on New Years Day that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had censored an episode of the Netflix series Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj that’s critical of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, it wasn’t a surprise. An outrage, yes. But not a surprise.

Saudi Arabia has a long history of censorship and human rights abuses, and the anti-cybercrime law the kingdom says the episode violated dates back to 2007. And though the rise of bin Salman was greeted by the US and Silicon Valley with enthusiasm, his reforms (women are finally allowed to drive) have come alongside continued abuses (hundreds of women “disappeared” for their activism). But the Netflix incident is also indicative of the pressures tech companies face beyond Saudi Arabia amid a global trend toward digital authoritarianism that shows no sign of slowing.

Minhaj, an American comedian, devoted an episode of his show to the Saudi regime on October 28, weeks after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at its embassy in Istanbul. The CIA later concluded that bin Salman directly ordered the hit on Khashoggi. “But he has been getting away with autocratic shit like this for years with almost no blowback,” Minhaj says during the show, and suggests that after years of human rights abuses, it’s finally time for the US to reassess its relationship with the strategic ally.

The episode was available to watch in Saudi Arabia for two months until Netflix took it down last week in response to a request from the country’s Communications and Information Technology Commission. Officials allege that the episode broke Article 6 of its anti-cybercrime law, which criminalizes “production, preparation, transmission, or storage of materials impinging on public order, religious values, public morals, and privacy, through the information Network or computers.” The episode is still available to watch on Netflix outside Saudi Arabia.

“Free speech and the free flow of information are heavily restricted in Saudi Arabia by way of laws, institutional and cultural norms, and various other mechanisms of social control,” says Ellery Biddle, advocacy director at the free speech nonprofit Global Voices. “There have been robust efforts to restrict public knowledge and perception of the Khashoggi case, so it’s not surprising that this happened.”

Critics admonished Netflix for complying with the kingdom’s request to take down the comedy show. “By bowing to the Saudi Arabian authorities’ demands, Netflix is in danger of facilitating the Kingdom’s zero-tolerance policy on freedom of expression and assisting the authorities in denying people’s right to freely access information,” Samah Hadid, Amnesty International’s Middle East director of campaigns, said in a statement.

Netflix defended its action, pointing out in a statement that it only took down the episode after the kingdom sent the company “a valid legal request.” Netflix, like most American tech companies, goes to great pains to comply with local laws in order to operate globally.

The situation with Saudi Arabia is a notable portent for the near future if the rest of the world continues its slide toward digital authoritarianism. That slide, a decade in the making at least, is becoming precipitous. A recent report from the nonprofit Freedom House noted that at least 17 countries proposed or passed regulations curbing free speech online since June 2017. Egypt passed a law banning any websites “deemed to threaten national security,” and requires people who visit such sites be jailed for up to a year. Iran, in which Netflix became available only two years ago, strengthened its internet censorship laws last year, too, with new rules about what can be posted in messaging apps. Tunisia introduced a bill to criminalize defamation online. The list goes on. All of this leads to an internet that is less free and more balkanized, where each nation has different rules—and where companies like Netflix will face the question of how, or whether, they can ethically operate in some markets.

“It’s now clear that as digital streaming services launch in new markets, governments will treat them in the same manner they regulate the local film or television industry,” says Adrian Shahbaz, lead author of the Freedom House report. “That means that in countries where the authorities have little regard for freedom of expression, companies will come under increasing pressure to censor political, social, or religious content they wouldn’t normally worry about under US or European law.”

Minhaj’s episode is not the first time that Netflix has taken down shows in certain countries. It removed three episodes of different shows in Singapore that allegedly violated a law against positive portrayals of drug use. But generally, Netflix says, the company makes all its global originals available in every country where it operates and only removes shows if legally required to do so in the jurisdiction.

Shahbaz says that Netflix’s response to the Saudi takedown request was in line with an emerging set of best practices for companies dealing transparently with such censorial pressure. “They should state precisely what law they are complying with, what piece of content is being removed, and what steps they’re taking to ensure the action has the smallest possible impact on human rights,” he says. “From what I can tell, Netflix has done those three things fairly well. They’ve stated the law and episode in question, and complied by taking the most minimalistic action available to them—censoring only that one episode and only within Saudi Arabia.” He also notes the company left the episode up on its YouTube channel.

If Netflix didn’t comply with such requests, the site could be blocked entirely. “Unlike in a democracy, where a company can appeal an unjust order using the courts, companies face far fewer options in a place like Saudi Arabia: essentially, either comply or risk being banned,” notes Shabhaz. That’s obviously bad for the company’s bottom line, but it would also curtail access to information. Saudi Arabia, for instance, had a prohibition on all public movie screenings until just last spring (it lifted the 35-year ban just in time to screen Black Panther), making Netflix a crucial way for people to watch television, movies, and documentaries. “On balance, I think it is more important for Saudis to have some access to the service than none at all,” says Biddle.

That kind of complex tradeoff is what companies like Netflix face when navigating local laws around the world. (It’s even trickier for social media companies, who don’t have Netflix’s control over the content uploaded onto their sites, but still have to comply with local laws.) Netflix doesn’t operate in China, since it has not been able to square its platform’s model with China’s strict content rules.

More than an issue of Netflix acquiescing to Saudi pressure, this incident underscores the power and appeal of local laws that determine the kinds of materials allowed online. Although the takedown appears to have drawn more attention to Minhaj’s criticisms rather than censor him—“Clearly, the best way to stop people from watching something is to ban it, make it trend online, and then leave it up on YouTube,” the comedian tweeted—the impact of such laws goes far beyond a single episode of a Netflix show being forced offline. People are thrown in jail, silenced, even murdered; they’re prevented from accessing vital information. “The Saudi government only confirmed what Hasan Minhaj so brilliantly argued—that the crown prince’s so-called ‘reform agenda’ is smoke and mirrors at best, or as is increasingly becoming clear, actually represents a further deterioration of political freedom in the country,” Shahbaz says.

In what would be his final column, published posthumously in the Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi wrote, “There was a time when journalists believed the Internet would liberate information from the censorship and control associated with print media. But these governments, whose very existence relies on the control of information, have aggressively blocked the Internet.” The title of his column was “What the Arab world needs most is free expression.”

To counter oppressive regimes and laws requires collaboration between civil society, tech companies, and democratic nations willing to fight for digital freedoms. For the US to take the lead in advocating for an open internet, it would need to do what Minhaj asked in his show: stop turning a blind eye toward the abuses of an ally.

More Great WIRED Stories

While New Horizons soaked up most of the world’s thirst for space stories over the holiday, there was another success story worth unpacking: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft finally entered asteroid Bennu’s orbit, after more than two years of hurtling through space toward the rock. On the afternoon of December 31, about 70 million miles away from Earth, Bennu broke the record for becoming the smallest object in space to have a human-made spacecraft in its orbit.

This was not a routine operation for NASA. Trying to insert a spacecraft into the orbit of an object like Bennu is a fraught process. The team at NASA ended up having to account for a myriad of variables that could have derailed the entire thing.

OSIRIS-REx currently sits in an elliptical orbit about a mile from the center of Bennu, taking 61 hours to complete a full spin. Bennu itself has a diameter of about 0.3 miles, and a mass of about 78 billion kilograms. The bigger the mass, the bigger the gravity—which allows for smaller objects to find their way into a stable orbit around larger objects. Unfortunately for Bennu, its small mass means it possesses 0.000005 times the gravity of Earth, which means it’s relatively easy for any object to simply escape the gravitational field and just keep floating on by into space (or crash into Bennu itself if it’s moving too fast). Yikes.

“[Bennu] is nearing the smallest object that you could possibly get to achieve a stable orbit around a body,” says Jason Leonard, the lead for the orbit determination team for the OSIRIS-REx mission. “[Bennu’s] size played the largest obstacle.” But the asteroid’s size is also why they chose it—because some type of orbit was actually achievable. “Anything else could have allowed the spacecraft to escape [orbit].”

The small size and gravity can often become exacerbated when they interact with other forces at play. For example, the OSIRIS-REx team originally wanted to see if a circular orbit was possible, but as Leonard explains, the team soon realized that pressure created by sunlight combined with the tenuous gravity of Bennu could be enough to start pushing the spacecraft out, creating wobbles and strains in its orbit.

“There were early challenges, before we really knew what Bennu’s shape was, what its mass was, and how it moved, that made for a lot of projected orbits that would wander back and forth,” he says. The team actually didn’t know what Bennu’s mass or gravity field looked like until OSIRIS-REx finally arrived at the asteroid in early December. None of these unknowns created a grave concern that OSIRIS-REx would abruptly fall out of orbit or get slung out into space, but obviously, you can’t really move forward with stable scientific work if you don’t have a stable orbit.

The team’s response was to ensure a “frozen orbit, which kind of takes other perturbing forces into account to help anchor the orbit [of OSIRIS-REx], so none of these other constraints impact it,” says Leonard. Artificial satellites above the Earth often have frozen orbits to minimize the impact of solar pressure, gravity, and spacecraft movement on orbital drift.

Moving forward, the orbit determination team is keeping a keen eye on any influences caused by gravitational forces, mass redistribution on the asteroid, thermal pressures, thruster firings, solar pressure, and other physical factors that could affect how the spacecraft moves around the asteroid. In June, the team will move OSIRIS-REx into a nearer orbit, closer to half-a-mile from the surface.

If something unexpected does happen—which would more likely be an unforeseen problem with the spacecraft’s hardware or software, or an anomaly picked up by the onboard sensors—the team has a built-in safety maneuver to have OSIRIS-REx escape Bennu’s orbit and head toward the sun until the problem can be resolved.

“Everything has gone incredibly well to date,” says Leonard. “Coming in, we had a lot of contingency plans. We were planning for every single possible thing we could think of. None of that came to fruition.” The mass of Bennu was less than predicted, but that had a minimal effect on the orbital insertion plan. “The spacecraft is performing much better than we ever anticipated.”

Many of the techniques designed to pull off an orbital insertion on a small object like Bennu have only arisen in the last decade or so. Some are actually refined based on experience others have had with missions like the European Space Agency’s Rosetta, or Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa 1 and 2. Probably the biggest lessons were taken from NASA’s Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous-Shoemaker mission from the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, which studied the near-Earth asteroid Eros.

The key difference is that those missions “just didn’t require the precision required to get down to the surface of this small-sized asteroid,” says Leonard. After all, one of the most crucial pieces of the OSIRIS-REx mission is to collect an asteroid sample that can go back to Earth for laboratory study.

There’s a lot in store for OSIRIS-REx and Bennu, and the excitement is only set to build as thing unfold. “The last few months since Bennu first showed up in our cameras as a dot or speck of light, to now as a whole world teaming with boulders and features, have really brought out the enthusiasm of the team,” says Leonard. “We are at the crossroads of engineering and science in deep space exploration.”

FirstsThis week we’re taking a look at first things, early things, and—for better or worse—things that are #1.  

Science fiction writers are professional future-dreamers, imagining worlds far beyond their own. With technology advancing at astronomical rates, real life feels more and more like sci-fi every day (for better or worse). So it’s fun to look back at those writers who, decades and even centuries ago, imagined what life would be like now—and some of their predictions were surprisingly accurate.

It’s difficult to pin down exactly who was the first to predict the internet, because the further back we go the more abstract these predictions become. However, these three authors are the best contenders for the title—within the very limited confines of Western European fiction—and you can decide which one of them was truly the first to predict the internet as it works today.

Edward Mitchell — The Senator’s Daughter (1879)

Edward Page Mitchell is far from a household name. Yet he was a foundational figure for modern sci-fi, dreaming up faster-than-light travel, cyborgs, teleportation, mutants, and time travel long before HG Wells and other more well-known writers developed these ideas. Despite being born in 1852, Mitchell’s short stories were amazingly prescient, and The Senator’s Daughter features a fascinating machine that parallels social media newsfeeds.

Written in 1879 but set in 1937, The Senator’s Daughter imagines the future of world politics, as a poignant, star-crossed romance plays out. Our young lovers are divided by politics and race, and Mitchell’s social commentary makes this story well worth a read. Although the focus is largely socio-political, Mitchell uses fantastic technology to place the events in the future—and that’s where we find our internet prediction. Here’s an excerpt:

[Mr. Wanlee] went to one side of the room, where an endless strip of printed paper, about three feet wide, was slowly issuing from between noiseless rollers and falling in neat folds into a willow basket placed on the floor to receive it. Mr. Wanlee bent his head over the broad strip of paper and began to read attentively.

“You take the Contemporaneous News, I suppose,” said the other.

“No, I prefer the Interminable Intelligencer,” replied Mr. Wanlee.

This unnamed contraption provides a constant stream of news from multiple different publications, reporting on live events around the world. It may seem small, but it’s quite amazing that Mitchell dreamed this machine up, considering that electronic printers were far from being invented. The immediacy of the reports, the breadth of publications, and the fact that this is all available in Mr Wanlee’s own home is reminiscent of social media newsfeeds, RSS feeds, and even Google News.

As Mitchell was primarily a journalist, it’s fitting that he predicted news culture in the internet age. However, although this story was chronologically published before the others on this list, Mitchell’s news machine is maybe a little too specific to be considered an all-encompassing prediction of the internet. But he wasn’t the only one to imagine live reports from around the world…

Mark Twain — From The London Times in 1904 (1898)

Mark Twain might be known for his sardonic depictions of quaint American life, but he occasionally branched out into other genres with his short stories. The 1898 story From The London Times In 1904 introduces a machine called the Telectroscope, described as a “limitless-distance” telephone that allows the user to view events all around the world in real-time, as well as interact with the people there. This provides comfort to one Mr Clayton, a man awaiting his execution after being accused of murder.

…day by day, and night by night, he called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with its people, and realized that by grace of this marvelous instrument he was almost as free as the birds of the air, although a prisoner under locks and bars.

In Twain’s story, the Telectroscope reveals that the man Clayton supposedly killed is still alive. Clayton is released, but the courts rule that his execution must still be carried out. Despite the evidence, Clayton is executed at the end of the story. In our current culture of defiance in the face of apparently indisputable evidence (say, of a crowd gathering to see a president elected), Twain’s scathing tale of obstinate blindness to the truth certainly resonates.

Unsurprisingly, Twain is frequently credited with being the first to predict smartphones and social media, as the Telectroscope is similar to the livestreams and video chats we use today. However, there is another author who arguably got much closer to a comprehensive view of how the internet works…

E.M. Forster — The Machine Stops (1909)

Between two of his most famous works, A Room With A View and Howard’s End, E.M. Forster took a break from writing about class hypocrisy to pen a futurist novella that doesn’t just predict many of the functions of the internet, but also its effect on society. The Machine Stops is set in a post-apocalyptic future wherein humanity has retreated underground to live in pods. Their society is managed, maintained, and controlled by the Machine, an automatic entity that is revered by all. The Machine provides every material comfort for the population, as well as allowing them to access a vast archive of information, and communicate with each other visually and aurally.

Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. […] There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

Although radio and telephones were becoming more widespread when Forster was writing, such a vast, automatic network was unheard of in 1909. The Machine parallels the internet in dozens of ways, from co-ordinating the practicalities of this society (much like how traffic lights are run automatically today), to archives of information and film, to instant communication.

This apparently comfortable society is not without its problems, however. People are wary of touching one another, and dare not question the Machine. In fact, we could even argue that Forster predicted the social media bubble, wherein people regurgitate ideas to those in their little internet community — at one point in The Machine Stops, a university professor warns people to “beware of new ideas!”

Although The Machine Stops was predated by Twain and Mitchell’s stories, Forster’s predictions are far more all-encompassing, with the Machine paralleling the internet beyond mere elements of social media. There will always be debate over who predicted the internet first, but Forster’s foresight is eerily similar to modern day. Ultimately, the Machine breaks down and with it, so does this civilization. We’ll just have to hope that this particular prediction doesn’t come true.