Across the globe governments are monitoring and censoring access to the web.
And if we’re not careful millions more people could find the internet fractured, fragmented and controlled by the state.
Every state 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 new found independence that will test these boundaries. Each state will attempt to regulate the internet, and shape it in its own image.
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.
When technologists began to notice states regulating and projecting influence online, some warned against a “Balkanisation 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. The 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. Information would largely flow within countries but not across them, due to filtering, language or even just user preference. The process would at first be barely perceptible to users, but it would fossilize over time and ultimately remake the internet…
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