Internet: 200 National Nets, Inet Falling Apart

[grarpamp]

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/518762-is-the-internet-falling-apart

And since you refuse to go build it P2P among yourselves,
the alternet will be just as controlled censored ID's and
useless for freedom as the Inet and 200 nets.


Roger Cochetti directed internet public policy for IBM from 1994
through 2000 and later served as Senior Vice-President & Chief Policy
Officer for VeriSign and Group Policy Director for CompTIA. This week
he warned about signs "that the once open, global internet is slowly
being replaced by 200, nationally-controlled, separate internets."
And, while these separate American, Chinese, Russian, Australian,
European, British, and other "internets" may decide to have some
things in common with each other, the laws of political gravity will
slowly pull them further apart as interest groups in each country
lobby for their own concerns within their own country. Moreover, we
will probably see the emergence of a global alternate internet before
long...

As background, it's important to recognize that — by almost any
measure — the global internet is controlled by businesses and
non-profits subject to the jurisdiction of the United States
government. Within a roughly 1,000-mile strip of land stretching from
San Diego to Seattle lie most major internet businesses and network
control or standards bodies (and those that aren't there likely lie
elsewhere in the United States). So — as the governments of China,
Russia and Iran never tire of explaining — while Americans constitute
around 310 million out of the world's 4.3 billion internet users
(around 8%), the U.S. government exercises influence or control over
more than 70% of the internet's controls and services... China's
ability to control the internet experience within its bordersx`
between roughly 2005 and 2018 taught many other countries that doing
so, even if costly, is possible. This lesson was not lost on Russia,
Iran, Australia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the EU and many other
countries, which began developing legal (and sometimes technical)
means to control internet content within their borders. This
legal/technical nationalization over the past decade was significantly
boosted by the realization that it was actually not very difficult for
a government to substantially shut down the internet within a
territory...

The first major step in the introduction of a new, China-centric
internet may have taken place last year when China introduced to the
UN's International Telecommunications Union a proposal for a new type
of protocol that would connect networks in a way comparable to, but
different from, the way that the internet protocols have done. This
was quickly dubbed China's New IP, and it has been the subject of
major controversy as the nations and companies decide how to react.
Whether a new Chinese-centric internet is based on a new series of
protocols or is simply based on a new set of internet domain names and
numbers, it seems likely that this alternate internet will give
national governments quite a bit more control over what happens within
their territories than does the global, open internet. This feature
will attract quite a few national governments to join in — not least
Russia, Iran and perhaps Turkey and India.

The combined market power of those participating countries would make
it difficult for any global internet business to avoid such a new
medium. The likely result being two, parallel global computer
inter-networking systems... which is pretty much what Google CEO Eric
Schmidt predicted.