Some of this nationalistic dis-integration of the internet has been foreseen as the 1990s’ open/global internet gradually became a principal domain of war, news, espionage, politics, propaganda, banking, commerce, entertainment, and education since around 2005. The process of creating hundreds of individual, national internets has been slow because the global Internet — the network of networks — was never designed to recognize national borders and because the United States had been a forceful opponent of a fragmented set of national internets. Both of these conditions have changed — and they are changing rapidly.
To oversimplify, the genesis of the internet, the U.S. Defense Department’s DARPANET, was designed to allow completely different computer networks (think IBM and UNIVAC, or PC and Mac) to connect with each other by inserting between them a gateway that converts each network’s computer language into a common internet language, called internet protocols. The genius behind the concept is that not all computer networks needed to use the same computer language… they only had to convert to a common language at a gateway, which then routed everyone on every network to everyone on every other network. And — since computer networks do not inherently notice or care which city, province, state or country they’re in or the nationality of their human user — the technology was not designed to take national borders into account. This contrasts markedly with such media as broadcasting and telecommunications, which basically grew with the permission of national governments from within countries, and then governments allowed the interconnection of their national network to others under government-controlled technical and substantive arrangements.
As background, it’s important to recognize that — by almost any measure — the global internet is controlled by businesses and non-profits subject to the jurisdiction of the United States government. Within a roughly 1,000-mile strip of land stretching from San Diego to Seattle lie most major internet businesses and network control or standards bodies (and those that aren’t there likely lie elsewhere in the United States). So — as the governments of China, Russia and Iran never tire of explaining — while Americans constitute around 310 million out of the world’s 4.3 billion internet users (around 8 percent), the U.S. government exercises influence or control over more than 70 percent of the internet’s controls and services.
It took China millions — perhaps billions — of dollars and well over a decade to demonstrate that the inherently non-nationalistic nature of the internet could be managed through both technical and legal means, sometimes described as “The Great Firewall of China.” Without listing the wide range of methods that China has used to create an internet within China that is different from the “internet” in the U.S. or Europe, suffice it to say that unless someone in China has extraordinary technical means and is willing to risk breaking the rules, the internet in China is noticeably different (e.g. no Google, Facebook or Twitter). China’s ability to control the internet experience within its borders between roughly 2005 and 2018 taught many other countries that doing so, even if costly, is possible. This lesson was not lost on Russia, Iran, Australia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the EU and many other countries, which began developing legal (and sometimes technical) means to control internet content within their borders. This legal/technical nationalization over the past decade was significantly boosted by the realization that it was actually not very difficult for a government to substantially shut down the internet within a territory.
This sledgehammer approach to controlling the internet within a country’s borders was made possible in part by the prevalence of smartphones — which meant that simply closing any cell phone tower to data would shut off the internet within that tower’s reach. The result has been that, all of a sudden, a country that could never afford a “Great Firewall” had the ability to simply shut down the internet within defined territories; and countries ranging from India to Zimbabwe have done so.
And, so, the original open global nature of internet services has slowly been subjected to national controls, but only at either great cost or through the use of a sledgehammer. The next major step in this process will up the stakes: As early as 2018, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted that the internet would split in two, with an American-led internet coexisting with a new China/Russia-led internet. Schmidt’s prediction should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed China’s Belt and Road initiative or its stated public goal of playing a leading global role in information and communications technology (ICT) or its annual World Internet Conferences.
Click here to read more.
Source: The Hill
BCNN1 WP 