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.1 The 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.
First, the blatant: China is the world’s most active and enthusiastic filterer of information. Entire platforms that are hugely popular elsewhere in the world—Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter—are blocked by the Chinese government. Particular terms like “Falun Gong”—the name of the banned spiritual group in China associated with one flank of the opposition—are simply absent from the country’s virtual public space, victims of official censorship or widespread self-censorship. On the Chinese Internet, you would be unable to find information about politically sensitive topics like the Tiananmen Square protests, embarrassing information about the Chinese political leadership, the Tibetan rights movement and the Dalai Lama, or content related to human rights, political reform or sovereignty issues. When it comes to these topics, even some of the best-known Western media outlets fall victim to censorship. Bloomberg News was blocked in both English and Chinese following its June 2012 exposé on the vast family fortune of the then vice-president (and now president), Xi Jinping. Four months later, The New York Times experienced a similar fate after publishing a similar story about the then premier, Wen Jiabao. Unsurprisingly, information about censorship circumvention tools is also blocked. We learned how comprehensive and particular Chinese censorship authorities could be when, following a contentious trip by Google’s executive chairman, Eric, to Beijing in 2011, all traces of his visit were wiped from the Chinese Internet, while media coverage of his trip remained accessible everywhere else.
To the average Chinese user, this censorship is seamless—without prior knowledge of events or ideas, it would appear that they never existed. Further complicating matters, the Chinese government is not above taking a more proactive approach to online content: one estimate in 2010 suggested that Chinese officials had hired nearly three hundred thousand “online commenters” to write posts praising their bosses, the government and the Communist Party. (This kind of activity is often called Astroturfing—i.e., fake grassroots participation—and is a popular tactic with public-relations firms, advertising agencies and election campaigns around the world.)
China’s leadership doesn’t hesitate to defend its strict censorship policies. In a white paper released in 2010, the government calls the Internet “a crystallization of human wisdom” but states that China’s “laws and regulations clearly prohibit the spread of information that contains contents subverting state power, undermining national unity [or] infringing upon national honor and interests.” The Great Firewall of China, as the collection of state blocking tools is known, is nothing less than the guardian of Chinese statehood: “Within Chinese territory the Internet is under the jurisdiction of Chinese sovereignty. The Internet sovereignty of China should be respected and protected.” This type of unabashed and unapologetic approach to censorship would naturally appeal to states with strong authoritarian streaks, as well as states with particularly impressionable or very homogenous populations (who would fear the incursion of outside information on an emotional level).