INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
There are few stories as important right now as the internet being ripped asunder by the increasing animosity between the United States and
Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Alphabet, said last week at a private event in San Francisco that &I think the most likely scenario now
is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America.
He should know:
Alphabet and its Google subsidiary are on the front lines of that split, experiencing a massive furor over the company Project Dragonfly to
launch a censored search engine in the Middle Kingdom
It hardly alone though, with Apple facing militant criticism from Chinese netizens over its iPhone presentation and Facebook finding its
application for a corporate entity on the mainland being returned and rejected.
At the heart of this split is the death of the internet as
we once knew it: a unified layer for the transfer of human knowledge
As the internet has gained more and more power over society and our everyday lives, the need by governments worldwide to tame its
engineering to political and moral ends has increased dramatically.
About four years ago, I wrote a piece called &From internet to
internets& in which I argued that this sort of split was obvious
As I wrote at the time: &Across the world, it is becoming abundantly clear that the internet is no longer the independent and self-reliant
sphere it once was, immune to the peculiarities of individual countries and their laws
Rather, the internet is firmly under the control of every government, simultaneously.
Yet, the rules that countries like Spain put in place
around media and news didn''t split the internet as I had predicted
The economic power of the United States and China did
Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu may have declined in value this year, but their combined market caps is still in the trillions of dollars
WeChat, which is owned by Tencent, has more than a billion users, and while only 10% of its user base is estimated to be outside China, the
ties are growing as more countries build economic bridges with the mainland.
Sometimes, those bridges are quite literal
Through the Belt and Road initiative and fledgling institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China has provided massive
outlays to other nations primarily around infrastructure, building partnerships and deepening economic ties.
China and the United States
are increasingly fighting a global battle for tech legitimacy (Photo by Jason Lee / AFP / Getty Images)
That infrastructure is sometimes
roads, but it can also be in areas like telecommunications
Huawei has made massive inroads into Africa, both in smartphones and in core infrastructure
Chinese-owned Transsion, which most Westerners have probably never heard of, is the dominant smartphone manufacturer on the
continent.
Chinese-made telecom infrastructure
Increasingly Chinese apps
For all of the concerns of Congress and national security officials about Huawei and ZTE equipment entering the American or Australian
markets, the real fight for the future of the internet is going to be in precisely these developing regions which have no incumbent
technology.
That what has made the Trump administration strategy toward trade negotiations with China so miserable to watch
The focus has been on repeated rounds of tariffs that will ensure that Chinese goods — particularly in high-tech industries — are more
expensive to American consumers, allowing domestic manufacturers to better compete
Yet, the policies have done nothing to ensure that American values around the internet are exported to continents like Africa or South
America, or that Cisco equipment will be chosen over Huawei&s.
That might be changing at long last
The Financial Times reported yesterday that the Trump administration is preparing to double down on the Overseas Private Investment
Corporation, which offers commercial lending facilities to developing countries
It would be merged into another agency and given a much more rich budget (as high as $60 billion) to go and compete with Chinese financing
around the world.
Maybe that measure will be successful in closing the strategic distance between the two countries
Maybe rumors that the administration is going to broadly double down on the trade war will lead to a much more comprehensive set of
policies.
But along the way, regardless of what happens, these skirmishes will lead to a fracturing of the internet, and along with it, the
death of the internet as a bastion and voice of freedom and knowledge for all people everywhere.
