Geopolitics & A Divided Internet
As geopolitics changes, could we end up with multiple, locked down internets? What might that look like?
Lucy kept hitting the refresh button on her browser in her London flat late at night. That afternoon she’d received the token giving her access the Vietnam online public library. She needed it for her thesis research, but since Vietnam was in the AsiaNet zone, she required special permission. Her every move would be watched by an AI agent assigned to her. It would would determine what she could access.
Hamoud too was in a similar situation, but he was in Egypt based in the ArabNet zone and wanted access into the EuroNet zone for his research and to talk with his sister who’d moved to France for her studies. He’d had to provide his identity credentials, detail the nature of his request and await a token to grant access for a few hours to select websites and archives.
Sounds a bit odd given that we can zip about the internet today, now synonymous with the World Wide Web, and access so much, so fast. But as I outlined in a previous article on the geopolitics of data, maybe this isn’t so far-fetched? What might a “splinternet” look like? What are the implications.
How The Internet Could Divide
Russia has already put in place its own internet infrastructure and of course, China has the great firewall. Some countries have been limiting what people can access for decades, especially more authoritarian ones. Who also tend to shut down the internet when the masses get agitated.
As countries look for ways to manage and regulate the flows of data between them for taxation and economic protectionism, this could be a route to a fractured internet.
Countries today are tending towards values based alignments. We see this mostly expressed as democracy versus autocracy. Populism and nationalism too play a role. As the neoliberal idea of globalization continues to weaken, the flow of information, which has always been crucial to human societies, would necessarily be a part of this.
The rise of mis/disinformation and AI generated content, cyberwarfare and cybercrime with countries using non-state actors to attempt to destabilize others, might also play a role. Nations may form information alliances alongside military and trade alliances.
The Implications of a Divided Internet
Just as isolationism through polities like nationalism and populism have always proven disastrous in the past, so would a geofenced set of internets. Most damaging would be further entrenchment of digital tribalism where distrust of other nations in digital spheres carries out into the real world of trade barriers and unease between cultures.
The concept of human rights and free agency, already issues in China and Russia and their governance of the internet could suffer significantly versus more open democracies.
Yet democratic countries and those valuing equality, human rights and diversity may find that state and non-state actor belligerence and interference has become enough and thus create firewalls shutting out non-aligned countries.
Over time, as nations evolve their technologies differently, we may see innovations impeded with some countries advancing and others wallowing in a backwash of stifled innovation. This could also evolve into incompatible standards making interconnections even harder.
Issues such as data sharing and trading, cross-zone access, multicultural exchanges and problems such as cybercrime could become significant diplomatic issues. A form of digital citizenship might become as key as real-world citizenship. A passport may be physical and digital with special tokens.
A downside too would be the disconnecting of digital diaspora communities who can’t connect with their homeland, hurting not just familial cultural connections, but further reducing trade opportunities. It may hurt the remittances market as well if people can’t easily send money.
How Might Citizens React?
Humans are social and we move about the world quite a lot, we have for many thousands of years. We love to connect, often with other cultures for ideas, innovations and to learn about one another. And in most every country there are diaspora communities.
One would expect some interesting innovations in blackmarket VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) and perhaps more decentralized applications coming out of Web3 technologies. Perhaps even shady identity tokens will be created and sold to people who want access to another country’s internet.
The Deep Web may become even bigger than it is today. A sort of meshed together network piggybacking off the larger infrastructure. Internet service providers and infrastructure companies may set up “dark” secondary internets where they also make money from enabling access and transactions.
A Divided Internet
The ramifications of a divided internet ripple across our global sociocultural systems and not really in any positive ways. Mostly because it means divided story telling and an inability to see and engage with other cultures.
Since story narratives are the threads that bring nations and groups together are key to human survival, fracturing our ability to tell stories and find common ground would only serve to further hurt humanity’s evolution at such an opportunistic time.
It may not play out this way. It’s one of thousands, millions, of potential outcomes. But something we may want to think about as citizens who want to build a brighter, interconnected future.
The internet has it’s downsides, as do all technologies, but although it may not seem it today, it has brought us closer together. We are in a time of social revolutions around the world, in many societies and the internet is a place where we can meet as a species. It’s up to us in how we choose to do so.