A balkanized internet future?

Joi Ito has an important post on how the internet is in danger of becoming balkanized into separate "internets." Read the whole thing but here's an excerpt:

...there are people who don't like the policies of the Internet and either want to censor or otherwise manage differently THEIR internet. Others who don't like the way DNS works, have proposed alternative roots. This is possible and easy to do, but you end up with "the internets".

It is the fact that we have a single root and that we have global policies and protocols which allows the Internet to be a single network and allows anyone to reach anyone else in the world. Clearly, allowing anyone in the world to reach anyone else in the world with a single click introduces a variety of problems, but it creates a single global network which allows dialog and innovation to be shared worldwide without going through gateways or filters. This attribute of the Internet is a key to the future of a global democracy and I believe we need to fight to preserve this.

He's not the only person who's concerned. Greg Walton worries about Regime Change on the Internet.

My friend Tim Wu, a law professor specializing in international trade and intellectual property, has written an article for Slate: The Filtered Future: China's bid to divide the Internet.

He describes what he believes is a "larger assault on the identity of the Internet itself":

The Web was conceived as one global medium, by its nature open and free. But countries like China are pushing hard to divide that global network into a system of Balkanized national networks. Censorship of the sort Microsoft acceded to is grabbing headlines, but the more important restrictive measures are taking place quietly—and quietly succeeding.

He agrees with me that the NYT's Nick Kristof is naive in his claim that broadband will bring down the Chinese Communist Party. Then goes on to describe how China will shape it's own internet. I quote at length:

Another Chinese attempt at control involves the Internet's physical infrastructure. Within China, the Web looks more and more like a giant office network every day, centralized by design. Last month, China announced its latest build-out—the "Next Carrying Network," or CN2. This massive internal network will be fast, but it will also be built by a single, state-owned company and easy to filter at every step. Its addressing system (known as IPv6) is scarcely used in the United States and may make parts of the Chinese Internet and the rest of the world mutually unreachable. While such things are hard to measure, Internet maps suggest that, powered by projects like CN2, growth in China's domestic bandwidth is rapidly outpacing the speed of its international connections. Networkwise, China will soon be like a country with a great internal transport system but few roads leading in or out. The goal is an inward-looking network that is physically disconnected from the rest of the world.

China is also trying to influence Internet protocols. As anyone knows who has anonymously logged in to his or her neighbor's network, the American Wi-Fi standard creates access anarchy. Last year, citing national security concerns, China ordered all domestic and foreign electronics manufacturers to bundle Wi-Fi with a Chinese encryption standard called WAPI (the acronym stands for "Wireless Local Area Network Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure"). WAPI makes a wireless network closed rather than open by forcing every user of the network to register with a centralized authentication authority. Because it's under heavy pressure from the United States to lift trade restrictions, China has for the moment retreated from requiring all Wi-Fi units to be sold with WAPI. But the country is still pushing its own companies to use the standard and trying to get it adopted globally. What the WAPI campaign foretells are future battles between open American standards and closed Chinese versions.

Techno-optimists like Kristof nonetheless take it as an article of faith that all of China's controls are destined to fail. They echo the hacker's creed—if a system can be beaten it will, so control of information is impossible. They point out that when chat rooms are closely monitored, people start talking about "cabbages" when they mean "democracy." As one blogger wrote recently, "No democratic movement in the history of mankind has ever stalled just because the word 'democracy' could not be uttered." But these arguments ignore a fundamental principle in legal theory: A law does not need to be perfect to be effective. If you're talking about carrots and cabbages instead of multiparty elections, the Communist Party has already won. Ordinary Chinese won't have any idea of what you're talking about. Competing discussion threads that rant against the Japanese, on the other hand, will continue to enjoy mass appeal.

China's long-term vision is clear: an Internet that feels free and acts as an engine of economic progress yet in no way threatens the Communist Party's monopoly on power. With every passing day the Chinese Internet reflects that vision more closely. It portends a future for the Web that we're only beginning to understand—one in which powerful countries refashion the global network to suit themselves.

Comments

[Jon Garfunkel]

Granted: disinformation, manipulation, political ignorance, and "an Internet that feels free" thrive in our democracy as well.

[Travis]

I've always been skeptical of the notion that China will be the leading economic power in the world some day soon. Not that it is impossible--far from it--it is very possible and even logical. But all throughout Chinese history, the governement in power has found a way to screw things up through ultra-conservative reactions to technology and changes brought from innovation and accomplishment. Maybe this is it in out times (or times soon to come, at least). China could produce a "national Intranet" that doesn't play nicely with others on the Internet, but it would be the death of their national prosperity. Closed systems (speaking IT still) just don't work well and end up having to open up some or die.

1) China needs to play along with the rest of the world if they expect to keep up on technological development. Improvements in software, routing protocols, and encryption algorithms all lie in the public domain--or at least the free market domain. To reject them is suicide, really, as proprietary systems are notoriously insecure, slow, unstable, and expensive (see Microsoft). All too ironically, IPV6 and WAPI were developed by global organisations that had little to no input from China, as an example. (2) If they want to remain part of the global economy and keep global investment coming onto their country, they will have play nicely with others (again, IT speaking). To not do so is to risk trillions of dollars.

From a purely pragmatic approach, it's rather illogical that some in the Chinese government may well be thinking along these lines of creating a "Chinese Internet". They are undoubtedly having some great success with their filtering products and are making open and free speech very difficult. There is no need to go further, just refine it and accept the fact that some things will leak out. To go to such radical lengths of creating a separate Internet is well within the economic cliche of diminshing returns. It's so radical as to seem unbelievable, really. But this is the same nation that rejected the printing press, sophisticated maritime travel, and the weaving loom, so I can't refuse to accept any possibility.

Whatever the hypotheticals, this is interesting, indeed. Thanks, Rebecca. This is fun.

[Travis]

CORRECTION to the above. I was thinking 802.11i when I saw WAPI. WAPI was developed by the Chinese and, if it is ever adopted in large scale, will be hacked quickly, I'm quite confident (see the Cisco/Microsoft LEAP protocol). Proprietary algorithms get hacked quickly--just the way it works.

[dc]

I find this counter-argument interesting:

http://thosewhodare.blogspot.com/2005/07/seeing-forest-but-trees-are-all-wrong.html