Splinternet – the end of the World Wide Web as we know it
Tech utopians once believed that the internet would be a self-governing, emancipatory realm.
One of them was John Perry Barlow who wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996. In the flowery, libertarian manifesto Barlow told the world’s governments – “weary giants of flesh and steel” – that there would be no place for their meddling on the World Wide Web.
Today, the dream is dead and buried. States are routinely treating cyberspace as an extension of their physical territories. The internet is being carved up and regulated. This is a worrying prospect not just for free speech and global trade but for the ability of people to agree on things in an already “post-truth” age.
The latest crack in the edifice of the net is the “sovereign internet” law that has just taken effect in Russia. The law gives the Kremlin sweeping powers to restrict domestic internet traffic by funnelling it through state-controlled nodes as well as the option to cut Russia off from the global internet if an “emergency” (as defined by the Kremlin) threatens it. To complement this “digital iron curtain”, last week Vladimir Putin proposed replacing Wikipedia with a more “reliable” Russian equivalent and has budgeted $27 million to do so.
Putin’s attempt to assert control over the web is part of a wider trend towards creating isolated internet fiefdoms. China has been a trailblazer in championing internet nationalism. Its nascent efforts to control cyberspace were dismissed by President Bill Clinton at the turn of the millennium; it would be like trying to “nail Jello to the wall”.
The Chinese are now the Jello-nailing masters. By building its own internet superstructure and by filtering and monitoring the content which appears on it, China’s Cnutian efforts to hold back the tide of the web have been alarmingly successful.
The country’s Great Firewall blocks access to foreign websites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The national equivalents of these sites are subject to rigorous sifting and censoring helping to align Chinese citizens’ view of the world with the Party’s preferred version. Google pulled out of China in 2010 amid censorship and hacking disputes but is currently developing a censored search engine for the Chinese market.
Seduced by the possibility of exerting control over the net, China’s neighbours have started to mimic its restrictive internet policies. Thailand passed a cybersecurity law earlier this year which hands the state extensive powers to monitor its citizens’ internet use and censor content. In Vietnam, a similar law forces companies like Facebook and Google to store the data they gather within Vietnam and to remove any content the government deems unsavoury.
A bipolar cyberspace, with a Chinese and Western model of the internet running side by side, is becoming easier to imagine. But differences in policy are also undermining the unity of the net within the West. Some American firms have taken to simply blocking European internet traffic from visiting US websites instead of complying with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Germany even floated the idea of building a domestic internet infrastructure, partly in response to the revelation that America’s National Security Agency might have monitored foreign internet traffic passing through the United States.
While diverging internet rules and standards will hamper e-commerce globally, the US stands to lose the most from the web’s fragmentation. US tech giants have a stranglehold on what is increasingly thought of as the world’s most valuable resource: data. The profusion of local internets will undermine the free flow of information that has allowed firms like Google, Facebook and Amazon to prosper. Cyber barriers will also curtail the soft power America exerts in the world by restricting the diffusion of the country’s political values and culture.
The last few years could well have been a warm-up act for what a multitude of internets could do to global discourse. “When I look at Trump supporters, rather often, they seem legitimately insane to me.” The words of public intellectual Sam Harris encapsulate a clash of world views which can seem incomprehensible to one another. Needless to say, the idea that the other side is not just wrong but deranged is reflected just as vehemently by many fans of the President.
But once we acknowledge that most people aren’t actually insane then this discrepancy between perception and reality becomes both interesting and dangerous. Harris diagnoses his own bias, suggesting that it’s the result of the fact that people are forming their opinions by drawing from separate pools of information which in many cases do not overlap and which are invisible to those not embedded within them. This “leaves us all unable to accurately interpret other people’s behaviour because we don’t see the information they’re imbibing”.
This is a product of the echo chamber effect that we all know so well. We’ve seen the results: a polarisation of opinion that renders debates intractable. But this outcome has stemmed from an internet that still functions as a relatively unified realm – the other side’s information is available, but just not channelled to your particular news feed.
A fragmenting internet will mean that people are not even drawing their information from the same repository of knowledge but instead from incompatible spheres. Failing to agree on even the most basic facts in a world of domestic Wikipedias would be the final destination of the post-truth era.
Not all tech utopians have given up on the dream. Last month, on the 50th anniversary of the internet’s birth, Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave a stark warning that the vision for his gift to the world, the World Wide Web, is being “subverted”. The globalist, egalitarian project is being weaponised by “scammers, people spreading hatred or vested interests threatening democracy.”
Despite this bleak warning, Sir Tim also reminded the world of the web’s successes and continued potential. “The internet – and the World Wide Web it enabled – have changed our lives for the better and have the power to transform millions more in the future.” He has published a Contract for the Web which outlines the principles that citizens, companies and governments should follow to “protect the open web as a public good and a basic right for everyone.”
But the technology to build digital walls is proliferating. The protectionist and authoritarian incentives to do so show no sign of abating. It looks like the splinternet is here to stay.