Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

Not all states will look to collaborate with others during the balkanization process, but the end result just the same will be a jumble of national Internets and virtual borders. The trend toward globalized platforms like Facebook and Google creates a system for technology that is more likely to spread, which will mean a broader distribution of engineering tools that people can use to build their own online structures. Without state regulation that inhibits innovation, this growth trend will happen very rapidly. In the early stages, users won’t realize when they are on another country’s Internet because the experience will be seamless, as it is today. While states work to carve out their autonomy in the online world, most users will experience very little change.

That homeostasis, however, will not last. What started as the World Wide Web will begin to look more like the world itself, full of internal divisions and divergent interests. Some form of visa requirement will emerge on the Internet. This could be done quickly and electronically, as a method to contain the flow of information in both directions, requiring that users register and agree to certain conditions to access a country’s Internet. If China decides that all outsiders need to have a visa to access the Chinese Internet, citizen engagement, international business operations and investigative reporting will all be seriously affected. This, along with internal restrictions of the Internet, suggests a twenty-first-century equivalent of Japan’s famous sakoku (“locked country”) policy of near-total isolation enacted in the seventeenth century.

Some states may implement visa requirements as both a monitoring tool for international visitors and as a revenue-generating exercise—a very small fee would be charged automatically upon entering a country’s virtual space, even more if one’s online activities (which the government could track by cookies and other tools) violated the terms of the visa. Virtual visas would appear in response to security threats related to cyber attacks; if your IP came from a blacklisted country, you would encounter heightened screenings and monitoring.

Some states, however, would make a public show of not requiring visas to demonstrate their commitment to open data and to encourage other states to follow their example. In 2010, Chile became the first country in the world to approve a law that guarantees net neutrality. About half of Chile’s 17 million people are online today, and as the country continues to develop its technological infrastructure, public statements like this will no doubt endear Chile to other governments that support its forward-looking communication policies. Countries coming online now will weigh the Chilean model against others. They might be asked to sign no-visa commitments with other states in order to build trade relations around e-commerce and other online platforms, like a Schengen Agreement (Europe’s borderless zone) for the virtual world.

Under conditions like these, the world will see its first Internet asylum seeker. A dissident who can’t live freely under an autocratic Internet and is refused access to other states’ Internets will choose to seek physical asylum in another country to gain virtual freedom on its Internet. There could be a form of interim virtual asylum, where the host country would share sophisticated proxy and circumvention tools that would allow the dissident to connect outside. Being granted virtual asylum could be a significant first step toward physical asylum, a sign of trust without the full commitment. Virtual asylum would serve as an extra layer of vetting before the physical asylum case reached the courts.

Virtual asylum will not work, however, if the ultimate escalation occurs: the creation of an alternative domain name system (DNS), or even aggressive and ubiquitous tampering with it to advance state interests. Today, the Internet as we know it uses the DNS to match computers and devices to relevant data sources, translating IP addresses (numbers) into readable names and vice versa. The robustness of the Internet depends on all computers and networks’ using the same official DNS root (run by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN), which contains all the top-level domains that appear as suffixes on web addresses—.edu, .com, .net and others.

But there are alternative DNS roots in existence, operating in parallel with the Internet but not attached to it. Within tech circles, most believe that the creation of an alternative DNS would go against everything the Internet represents and was built to do: namely, share information freely. No government has yet achieved an alternative system, 3but if a government succeeded in doing so, it would effectively unplug its population from the global Internet and instead offer only a closed, national intranet. In technical terms, this would entail creating a censored gateway between a given country and the rest of the world, so that a human proxy could facilitate external data transmissions when absolutely necessary—for matters involving state resources, for instance.

For the population, popular proxy measures like VPNs and Tor would no longer have any effect because there wouldn’t be anything to connect to. It’s the most extreme version of what technologists call a walled garden. On the Internet, a walled garden refers to a browsing environment that controls a user’s access to information and services online. (This concept is not limited to discussions of censorship; it has deep roots in the history of Internet technology: AOL and CompuServe, Internet giants for a time, both started as walled gardens.) For the full effect of disconnection, the government would also instruct the routers to fail to advertise the IP addresses of websites—unlike DNS names, IP addresses are immutably tied to the sites themselves—which would have the effect of putting those websites on a very distant island, utterly unreachable. Whatever content existed on this national network would circulate only internally, trapped like a cluster of bubbles in a computer screen saver, and any attempts to reach users on this network from the outside would meet a hard stop. With the flip of a switch, an entire country would simply disappear from the Internet.

This is not as crazy as it sounds. It was first reported in 2011 that the Iranian government’s plan to build a “halal Internet” was under way, and more than a year later it seemed that the official launch was imminent. The regime’s December 2012 launch of Mehr, its own version of YouTube with “government-approved videos,” added yet another data point that the regime was serious about the project. Details of the plan remained hazy, but according to Iranian government officials, in the first phase the national “clean” Internet would exist in tandem with the global Internet for Iranians (heavily censored as it is), then it would come to replace the global Internet altogether. This would entail moving all the “halal” websites to a particular block of IP addresses, which would make it trivially easy to filter out websites that are outside the halal block. The government and affiliated institutions would provide the content for the national intranet, either gathering it from the global web and scrubbing it, or creating it manually. All activity on the network would be closely monitored, facilitated by the government’s top-level infrastructure control and agency over software (something Iranian officials are very concerned about, judging from a 2012 ban on the import of foreign computer security software). Iran’s head of economic affairs told the country’s state-run news agency that they hoped their halal Internet would come to replace the web in other Muslim countries, too—at least those with Farsi speakers. Pakistan has pledged to build something similar.