Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

As it was initially conceived, the Internet is a network of networks, a huge and decentralized web of computer systems designed to transmit information using specific standard protocols. What the average user sees—websites and applications, for example—is really the flora and fauna of the Internet. Underneath, millions of machines are sending, processing and receiving data packets at incredible speed over fiber-optic and copper cables. Everything we encounter online and everything we produce is ultimately a series of numbers, packaged together, sent through a series of routers located around the world, then reassembled at the other end.

We have often described the Internet as a “lawless” space, ungoverned and ungovernable by design. Its decentralized makeup and constantly mutating interlinking structure make government attempts to “control” it futile. But states have an enormous amount of power over the mechanics of the Internet in their own countries. Because states have power over the physical infrastructure connectivity requires—the transmission towers, the routers, the switches—they control the entry, exit and waypoints for Internet data. They can limit content, control what hardware people are allowed to use and even create separate Internets. States and citizens both gain power from connectivity, but not in the same manner. Empowerment for people comes from what they have access to, while states can derive power from their position as gatekeeper.

So far we have focused mostly on what will happen when billions more people come online—How will they use the Internet? What kinds of devices will they use? How will their lives change?—but we haven’t yet said what their Internet will look like, or how states will make the most of it in their own physical and virtual dealings with other states and with their own people. This will increasingly matter, as populations with different alphabets, interests and sets of norms become connected, and as their governments bring their own interests, grudges and resources to the table. Perhaps the most important question in ten years’ time won’t be if a society uses the Internet, but which version of it they use.

As more states adapt to having large portions of their populations online, they’ll strive to maintain control, both internally and on the world stage. Some states will emerge stronger—more secure and with greater influence—from this transition into the virtual age, benefiting from strong alliances and smart uses of digital power, while others will struggle just to keep up with and adapt to technological changes both domestically and internationally. Friendships, alliances and enmities between states will extend into the virtual world, adding a new and intriguing dimension to traditional statecraft. In many ways, the Internet could ultimately be seen as the realization of the classic international-relations theory of an anarchic, leaderless world. Here’s how we think states will respond to each other and to their citizens.

The

Balkanization of the Internet

As we said, every state and society in the world has its own laws, cultural norms and accepted behaviors. As billions of people come online in the next decade, many will discover a newfound independence—in ideas, speech and conversation—that will test these boundaries. Their governments, by contrast, would largely prefer that these users encounter a virtual world that allows the powers that be to mirror their physical control, an understandable if fundamentally naïve notion. Each state will attempt to regulate the Internet, and shape it in its own image. The impulse to project laws from the physical world into the virtual one is universal among states, from the most democratic to the most authoritarian. What states can’t build in reality they’ll try to fashion in virtual space, excluding those elements of society that they dislike, the content that contravenes laws and any potential threats they see.

The majority of the world’s Internet users encounter some form of censorship—also known by the euphemism “filtering”—but what that actually looks like depends on a country’s policies and its technological infrastructure. Not all or even most of that filtering is political censorship; progressive countries routinely block a modest number of sites, such as those featuring child pornography.

In some countries, there are several entry points for Internet connectivity, and a handful of private telecommunications companies control them (with some regulation). In others, there is only one entry point, a nationalized Internet service provider (ISP), through which all traffic flows. Filtering is relatively easy in the latter case, and more difficult in the former. Differences in infrastructure like these, combined with cultural particularities and objectives of filtering, account for the patchwork of systems around the world today.

In most countries, filtering is conducted at the ISP level. Typically, governments put restrictions on the gateway routers that connect the country and on DNS (domain name system) servers. This allows them to either block a website altogether (e.g., YouTube in Iran) or process web content through “deep-packet inspection.” With deep-packet inspection, special software allows the router to look inside the packets of data that pass through it and check for forbidden words, among other things (the use of sentiment-analysis software to screen out negative statements about politicians, for example), which it can then block. Neither technique is foolproof; users can access blocked sites with circumvention technologies like proxy servers (which trick the routers) or by using secure https encryption protocols (which enable private Internet communication that, at least in theory, cannot be read by anyone other than your computer and the website you are accessing), and deep-packet inspection rarely catches every instance of banned content. The most sophisticated censorship states invest a great deal of resources to build these systems, and then heavily penalize anyone who tries to get around them.

When technologists began to notice states regulating and projecting influence online, some warned against a “balkanization of the Internet,” whereby national filtering and other restrictions would transform what was once the global Internet into a connected series of nation-state networks. 1The World Wide Web would fracture and fragment, and soon there would be a “Russian Internet” and an “American Internet” and so on, all coexisting and sometimes overlapping but, in important ways, separate. Each state’s Internet would take on its national characteristics. Information would largely flow within countries but not across them, due to filtering, language or even just user preference. (Evidence shows that most users tend to stay within their own cultural spheres when online, less for reasons of censorship than because of shared language, common interest and convenience. The online experience can also be faster, as network caching, or temporarily storing content in a local data center, can greatly increase the access speed for users.) The process would at first be barely perceptible to users, but it would fossilize over time and ultimately remake the Internet. 2

The first stage of this process, aggressive and distinctive filtering, is under way. It’s very likely that some version of the above scenario will occur, but the degree to which it does will greatly be determined by what happens in the next decade with newly connected states—which path they choose, whom they emulate and work together with, and what their guiding principles turn out to be. To expand on these variations, let’s look at a few different approaches to filtering in today’s world. We’ve identified at least three models: the blatant, the sheepish, and the politically and culturally acceptable.