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://
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.
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.