Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

Germany has strong anti-hate-speech laws that make Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi rhetoric illegal, and consequently the government blocks websites within Germany that express those views. And Malaysia, despite promising its citizens that it would never censor the Internet—going so far as to codify it in its Bill of Guarantees—abruptly blocked access to file-sharing sites like Megaupload and the Pirate Bay in 2011, claiming that the sites were in violation of another law, the country’s Copyright Act of 1987. In a statement, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission defended the move, writing, “Compliance with the law is not to be construed as censorship.” Many Malaysians disagreed, but the block remained politically and legally acceptable.

Of the three models, activists will pray that the third approach becomes the norm for states around the world, but this seems unlikely; only countries with highly engaged and informed populations will need to be this transparent and restrained. Since most governments will make such decisions before their citizens become fully connected, they will feel little incentive to proactively promote the kind of free and open Internet exhibited by countries in the “politically acceptable model.”

The trends we see today will continue in ways that are, for the most part, fairly predictable. All governments will feel as if they’re fighting a losing battle against an endlessly replicating and changing Internet, and balkanization will emerge as a popular mechanism to address this challenge. The next stage in the process for many states will be collective editing, states forming communities of interest to edit the web together, based on shared values or geopolitics. Collective action—be it in the physical or virtual world—will be a logical move for many states that find they lack the resources, the reach or the capability to influence vast territories. And even with balkanization, cyberspace is still a lot of ground to cover, so just as some states leverage each other’s military resources to secure more physical ground, so too will states form alliances to control more virtual territory. For larger states, collaborations will legitimize their filtering efforts and deflect some unwanted attention (the “look, others are doing it too” excuse). For smaller states, alliances along these lines will be a low-cost way to curry favor with bigger players and simultaneously gain some useful technical skills and capacity that they might lack at home.

Collective editing may start with basic cultural agreements and shared antipathies among states, such as what religious minorities they dislike, how they view other parts of the world or what their cultural perspective is on historical figures like Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong or Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In the online world, shared cultural and normative sensibilities create a gravitational pull among states, including those who might not otherwise have reason to band together. Larger states are less likely to engage in this than smaller ones—they already have the technical capabilities—so it will be a fleet of smaller states, pooling their resources, that will find this method useful. If some member countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), an association of former Soviet states, became fed up with Moscow’s insistence on standardizing the Russian language across the region, they could join together to censor all Russian-language content from their national Internets and thus limit their citizens’ exposure to Russia altogether.

Ideology and religious morals are likely to be the strongest drivers of these collaborations. They are already the strongest drivers of censorship today. Imagine if a group of deeply conservative Sunni-majority countries—say, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria and Mauritania—formed an online alliance around their common values and strategic needs and decided to build a “Sunni Web.” While technically this Sunni Web would still be part of the larger Internet, it would become the main source of information, news, history and activity for citizens living in these countries. For years, the development and spread of the Internet was highly determined by its English-only language standard, but the continued implementation of internationalized domain names (IDN), which allow people to use and access domain names written in non-Roman alphabet characters (e.g., http:// ), is changing this. The creation of a Sunni Web—indeed, all nationalized Internets—becomes more likely if its users can access a version of the Internet in their own language and script.

Within the Sunni Web, depending on who participated and who led its development, the Internet could be sharia-complicit: e-commerce and e-banking would look different, since no one would be allowed to charge interest; religious police might monitor online speech, working together with domestic law enforcement to report violations; websites with gay or lesbian content would be uniformly blocked; women’s movements online might somehow be curtailed; and ethnic and religious minority groups might find themselves closely monitored, restricted or even excluded. In this scenario, how possible it would be for a local tech-savvy citizen to circumvent this Internet and reach the global World Wide Web depends on which country he lived in: Mauritania might not have the desire or capacity to stop him, but Saudi Arabia probably would. If the Mauritanian government became concerned that its users were bypassing the Sunni Web, on the other hand, surely one of its new digital partners could help it build higher fences. Within collective editing alliances, the less paranoid states would allow their populations to access both versions of the Internet (somewhat like an opt-in parental control for television), betting on user preference for safe and uniquely tailored content instead of using brute force.

There will be some instances where autocratic and democratic nations edit the web together. Such a collaboration will typically happen when a weaker democracy is in a neighborhood of stronger autocratic states that coerce it to make the same geopolitical compromises online that it makes in the physical world. This is one of the rare instances where physical proximity actually matters in virtual affairs. For example, Mongolia is a young democracy with an open Internet, sandwiched between Russia and China—two large countries with their own unique and restrictive Internet policies. The former Mongolian prime minister Sukhbaatar Batbold explained to us that he wants Mongolia, like any country, to have its own identity. This means, he said, it must have good relations with its neighbors to keep them from meddling in Mongolian affairs. “We respect that each country has chosen for itself its own path in development,” he said. With China, “we have an understanding where we stay out of Tibet, Taiwan and Dalai Lama issues, and they do not interfere with our issues. The same applies with Russia, with which we have a long-standing relationship.”

A neutral stance of noninterference is more easily sustainable in the physical world. Virtual space significantly complicates this model because online, it’s people who control the activity. People sympathetic to opposition groups and ethnic minorities within China and Russia would look at Mongolia as an excellent place to congregate. Supporters of the Uighurs, Tibetans or Chechen rebels might seek to use Mongolia’s Internet space as a base from which to mobilize, to wage online campaigns and build virtual movements. If that happened, the Mongolian government would no doubt feel the pressure from China and Russia, not just diplomatically but because its national infrastructure is not built to withstand a cyber assault from either neighbor. Seeking to please its neighbors and preserve its own physical and virtual sovereignty, Mongolia might find it necessary to abide by a Chinese or Russian mandate and filter Internet content associated with hot-button issues. In such a compromise, the losers would be the Mongolians, whose online freedom would be taken away as a result of self-interested foreign powers with sharp elbows.