As governments push toward a splintered
internet, American corporations do little to counteract Balkanization
and instead do whatever is necessary to expand their operations. If the
future of the internet is a tripartite cold war, Silicon Valley wants to
be making money in all three of those worlds. Part
of the rationalization is that whether or not American companies get in
on the action, a homegrown company will readily enact the kind of
censorship and surveillance that its government requires. (Indeed, if
Google launches in China, it has an uphill battle to fight against
Baidu, the entrenched, government-endorsed Chinese search engine.) What
this future will bring for Europe and the United States is not clear.
Mr. Gomes’s leaked speech from inside Google sounded almost dystopian at
times. “This is a world none of us have ever lived in before,” Mr.
Gomes told employees. “All I am saying, we have built a set of hacks,
and we have kept them.” He seemed to hint at scenarios the tech sector
had never imagined before. The world may be a very different place since
the election of Donald Trump, but it’s still hard to imagine that
what’s deployed in China will ever be deployed at home. Yet even the
best possible version of the disaggregated web has serious — though
still uncertain — implications for a global future: What sorts of ideas
and speech will become bounded by borders? What will an increasingly
disconnected world do to the spread of innovation and to scientific
progress? What will consumer protections around privacy and security
look like as the internets diverge? And would the partitioning of the
internet precipitate a slowing, or even a reversal, of globalization? A
chillier relationship with Europe and increasing hostilities with China
spur on the trend toward Balkanization — and vice versa, creating a
feedback loop. If things continue along this path, the next decade may
see the internet relegated to little more than just another front on the
new cold war.
The editorial is bemoaning the balkanization of Internets, American, European, Chinese, to begin with. However, the real question is; what is the Internet?
We show above the essence of the Internet. Simply:
1. A backbone transport mechanism such as fiber, wireless, even copper.
2. A protocol set called TCP/IP. IP is the from and to addresses of the packets and TCP is the control mechanism to sequence all the packets in a message.
3. Routers to take a message and send it to the next location so that it may ultimately get to where it was sent.
4. Router Tables: A list of what router to send it to next
5. DNS: A device which converts an Internet address such as xxy.com to an IP address.
6. Communications Interfaces: Devices that interface with routers at end points.
Now what can the Chinese do? Simple, they can mask the routing tables or block DNS address conversions. They can send users seeking to go to a forbidden site to a control site, get their IP address, locate then and take appropriate remedies. Namely anyone who can control a DNS or routing Table can control a regional portion of the Internet. Balkanization already exists. Always has so in a way this is not new. In fact in 2000 when in Prague we connected a Czech only Internet to Frankfurt and the Tier 1 backbones. Overnight we have a global network. Yet before that any one in the Czech Republic could speak to anyone else.
Thus Balkanization has always been with us. So why the uproar. China would not block all traffic outward, only that which they see as inappropriate. After all, a hundred years ago the US Postal Service blocked all books coming into and out of the US that they deemed in appropriate. There is nothing new here.
But wait, to get to these balkanized Internets all one needs is an access portal in that net, and Tier 1 carriers afford that. So perhaps it will not be as easy as one thinks.
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