Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

It is possible that Iran’s threat is merely a hoax. How exactly the state intends to proceed with this project is unclear both technically and politically. How would it avoid enraging the sizable chunk of its population that has access to the Internet? Some believe it would be impossible to fully disconnect Iran from the global Internet because of its broad economic reliance on external connections. Others speculate that, if it wasn’t able to build an alternative root system, Iran could pioneer a dual-Internet model that other repressive states would want to follow. Whichever route Iran chooses, if it is successful in this endeavor, its halal Internet would surpass the Great Firewall of China as the single most extreme version of information censorship in history. It would change the Internet as we know it.

Virtual Multilateralism

In parallel with these balkanization efforts, we will see the rise of virtual multilateralism based on ideological or political solidarity, involving both states and corporations working together in official alliances. States like Belarus, Eritrea, Zimbabwe and North Korea—authoritarian, with strong personality cults and a pariah status elsewhere in the world—would have little to lose by joining an autocratic cyber union, where censorship and monitoring strategies and technologies could be shared. As these countries collaborated to build virtual-age police states, it would become increasingly difficult for Western companies, from a public-relations standpoint, to conduct business there, even if it was legal. This would create space for non-Western companies, whose shareholders may have fewer qualms and who are used to working in similar environments, to play a more active business role within a network of autocratic states.

It’s no accident, for example, that the company that owns 75 percent of North Korea’s only official mobile network, Koryolink, is the Egyptian telecom Orascom, a firm that thrived under the long reign of Hosni Mubarak. (The other 25 percent is owned by North Korea’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.) For North Korean subscribers, Koryolink service is a walled garden, a highly limited platform that allows for only basic functionality. Koryolink users can’t make or receive international calls; nor can they access the Internet. (Some people can access the North Korean intranet, an odd pastiche of online content, mostly propaganda, that government officials transfer over from the Internet.) Local phone calls and text messages are almost certainly monitored, and The Economist reported that the network is already a platform for the dissemination of government propaganda, with the North Korean daily Rodong Sinmun sending users the latest news by text message. While it is not officially a requirement, most people are “encouraged” to pay their phone bills in euros (which are unofficially in circulation), a tall order for most North Koreans. Even so, the demand for phones was so great that adoption soared in the country, leaping from three hundred thousand subscribers to more than a million within an eighteen-month period ending in early 2012. Koryolink’s gross operating margin of 80 percent means big business for Orascom.

In Iran, following a very public crackdown on the country’s green movement in 2009, Western technology companies like Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) sought to distance themselves from the regime. In their absence, the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei swept in and seized the opportunity to dominate the large (and state-controlled) Iranian mobile market. While its Western predecessors faced a backlash at home for selling products to the Iranian government that were used to track and suppress democracy activists, Huawei actively promoted its products in an authoritarian-friendly light. Its catalog was unapologetic, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal, with products like location-based tracking equipment for law enforcement (recently purchased by Iran’s largest mobile operator) and a censorship-friendly mobile news service. Huawei’s favorite domestic partner in Iran, Zaeim Electronic Industries Co., is also the favorite of government branches, including the Revolutionary Guards and the office of the president.

Officially, Huawei claims to offer Zaeim only “commercial public-use products and services,” but according to The Wall Street Journal, in off-the-record pitch meetings with Iranian officials, Huawei made clear its expertise in information censorship, mastered in China. (Huawei published a press release shortly after the story’s publication denying several of its assertions, and a month later stated that it would “voluntarily restrict” its business operations in Iran due to the “increasingly complex situation.”)

In response to these collaborations between autocratic countries, democratic states will want to build similar alliances and public-private partnerships to promote a more open Internet with greater political, economic and social freedom. One goal will be to contain the spread of highly restrictive filtering and monitoring technologies to countries with low but growing Internet penetration. This could manifest itself in many different strategies, including bilateral assistance packages with specific preconditions and making an open Internet a premier policy objective for a country’s ambassadors. There could also be transnational campaigns to change the international legal framework around free expression and open-source software. The shared, “bigger picture” goals of these states—access to information, freedom of expression, and transparency—would trump the minor policy or cultural differences between them, creating a kind of revived Hanseatic League of connectivity. The Hanseatic League wielded collective power across Northern Europe from the thirteenth century through the fifteenth through its economic alliances between adjacent city-states; its contemporary equivalent could be based on similar principles of mutual assistance but in a far larger, globalized version. No longer will alliances rely so heavily on geography; everything is equidistant in virtual space. If Uruguay and Benin find cause to work together, it will be easier to do so than ever before.

Part of defending freedom of information and expression in the future will entail a new element of military aid. Training will include technical assistance and infrastructural support in lieu of tanks and tear gas—though the latter will probably remain part of the arrangement. What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first. Indeed, traditional defense-industry leaders like Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are already working with the U.S. government to develop cyber-capacity. Weapons manufacturers, airplane builders and other parts of the military-industrial complex might not lessen—conventional militaries will always require guns, tanks and helicopters—but big military operations, already heavily privatized, will carve out space in their budgets for technical assistance.

Development assistance and foreign aid will take on a digital dimension too, buoyed by these new multilateral alliances. The trade of foreign assistance for future influence won’t change, but the components will. In a given developing country, one foreign power might be building roads, another investing in agriculture and a third building fiber networks and cell towers. In the digital age, modern technology becomes yet another tool for forging alliances with developing states; we shouldn’t underestimate how important technological competency will be for these countries and their governments. The push for foreign aid in the shape of fast networks, modern devices, and cheap and plentiful bandwidth may come from the population, pressuring the governments to agree to the necessary preconditions. Whatever the impetus, future states in the developing world will make a long-term bet on connectivity and align their diplomatic relationships accordingly.