There May Soon Be Three Internets. America's Won't Necessarily Be the Best.

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: October 19, 2018 at 12:25:41 AM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] There May Soon Be Three Internets. America's Won't Necessarily Be the Best.
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> There May Soon Be Three Internets. America’s Won’t Necessarily Be the Best.
> A breakup of the web grants privacy, security and freedom to some, and not so much to others.
> By The Editorial Board
> Oct 15 2018
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/opinion/internet-google-china-balkanization.html>
>
> In September, Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive and Alphabet chairman, said that in the next 10 to 15 
> years, the internet would most likely be split in two — one internet led by China and one internet led by the United 
> States. 
>
> Mr. Schmidt, speaking at a private event hosted by a venture capital firm, did not seem to seriously entertain the 
> possibility that the internet would remain global. He’s correct to rule out that possibility — if anything, the flaw 
> in Mr. Schmidt’s thinking is that he too quickly dismisses the European internet that is coalescing around the 
> European Union’s ever-heightening regulation of technology platforms. All signs point to a future with three 
> internets.
>
> The received wisdom was once that a unified, unbounded web promoted democracy through the free flow of information. 
> Things don’t seem quite so simple anymore. China’s tight control of the internet within its borders continues to tamp 
> down talk of democracy, and an increasingly sophisticated system of digital surveillance plays a major role in human 
> rights abuses, such as the persecution of the Uighurs. We’ve also seen the dark side to connecting people to one 
> another — as illustrated by how misinformation on social media played a significant role in the violence in Myanmar. 
>
> There’s a world of difference between the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, known commonly as 
> G.D.P.R., and China’s technologically enforced censorship regime, often dubbed “the Great Firewall.” But all three 
> spheres — Europe, America and China — are generating sets of rules, regulations and norms that are beginning to rub 
> up against one another. What’s more, the actual physical location of data has increasingly become separated by 
> region, with data confined to data centers inside the borders of countries with data localization laws. 
>
> The information superhighway cracks apart more easily when so much of it depends on privately owned infrastructure. 
> An error at Amazon Web Services created losses of service across the web in 2017; a storm disrupting a data center in 
> Northern Virginia created similar failures in 2012. These were unintentional blackouts; the corporate custodians of 
> the internet have it within their power to do far more. Of course, nobody wants to turn off the internet completely — 
> that wouldn’t make anyone money. But when a single company with huge market share chooses to comply with a law — or 
> more worryingly, a mere suggestion from the authorities — a large chunk of the internet ends up falling in line. 
>
> The power of a handful of platforms and services combined with the dismal state of international cooperation across 
> the world pushes us closer and closer to a splintered internet. Meanwhile, American companies that once implicitly 
> pushed democratic values abroad are more reticent to take a stand. 
>
> In 2010, Google shut down its operations in China after it was revealed that the Chinese government had been hacking 
> the Gmail accounts of dissidents and surveilling them through the search engine. “At some point you have to stand 
> back and challenge this and say, this goes beyond the line of what we’re comfortable with, and adopt that for moral 
> reasons,” said Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, in an interview with Der Spiegel at the time.
>
> But eight years later, Google is working on a search engine for China known as Dragonfly. Its launch will be 
> conditional on the approval of Chinese officials and will therefore comply with stringent censorship requirements. An 
> internal memo written by one of the engineers on the project described surveillance capabilities built into the 
> engine — namely by requiring users to log in and then tracking their browsing histories. This data will be accessible 
> by an unnamed Chinese partner, presumably the government. 
>
> Google says all features are speculative and no decision has been made on whether to launch Dragonfly, but a leaked 
> transcript of a meeting inside Google later acquired by The Intercept, a news site, contradicts that line. In the 
> transcript, Google’s head of search, Ben Gomes, is quoted as saying that it hoped to launch within six to nine 
> months, although the unstable American-China relationship makes it difficult to predict when or even whether the 
> Chinese government will give the go-ahead. “There is a huge binary difference between being launched and not 
> launched,” said Mr. Gomes. “And so we want to be careful that we don’t miss that window if it ever comes.” 
>
> Internet censorship and surveillance were once hallmarks of oppressive governments — with Egypt, Iran and China being 
> prime examples. It’s since become clear that secretive digital surveillance isn’t just the domain of anti-democratic 
> forces. The Snowden revelations in 2013 knocked the United States off its high horse, and may have pushed the 
> technology industry into an increasingly agnostic outlook on human rights. Its relationship with the government isn’t 
> improving, either, when the industry is being hammered by the Trump administration’s continuing trade wars. (This 
> month, Vice President Mike Pence condemned Dragonfly as part of a longer, confrontational speech accusing China of 
> “economic aggression.”) 
>
> [snip]
>
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