How Splinternet Is Threatening To Free Flow of Information, Knowledge and Business Opportunities

Splinternet - Why Is Is Threat To Free Flow of Knowledge and Information 

Emergence of World Wide Web or www brought a new kind of liberation world over with free flow of information and knowledge, even the walled nation could not insulate them from it. There were many protests and liberation movements using digital power. 

This led to authoritarian governments to shutdown of internet anytime as per there sweet will but now there is another strong weapon splinternet has emerged. 

It  is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to factors such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and divergent national interests. Russia’s disconnection from the online services of the West has been as abrupt and complete as its disconnection from real-world global trade routes.

Probably it started with China which tried to control internet in its geographical limits , but it has perhaps the most famously complex relationship with the internet. While Chinese-born tech companies thrive in the West—just look at TikTok—almost all online services used by people within China are Chinese companies. The country also operates a huge and regular form of online censorship, typically referred to as the Great Firewall of China.

Recently, with Ukrainian conflict Russia insulated itself in terms of global social media apps.Facebook has been blocked entirely by Russian authorities, while Twitter is almost completely cut off. Many more companies have voluntarily withdrawn from the Russian market—including Apple, Microsoft, TikTok, Netflix, and others. Russia is rapidly joining the likes of Iran as a digital pariah state.

The European Union, in turn, is seeking to all but wipe certain Russian outlets from the internet—with guidance on new bans of state-owned RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik suggesting that not only should the sites be blocked, but that search engines and social networks should hide delete any post repeating content from said sites.

But all these are just services that use the internet, rather than the technologies or agreements that power it. Facebook being blocked in a country is basically no different than Facebook withdrawing from a country, or simply going bust or shutting down.

But more profound splits are on the cards—provoked by action on both sides. Russia has declared Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) to be an “extremist organization” and is withdrawing from international governance bodies such as the Council of Europe and has been suspended from the European Broadcasting Union. If such moves were replicated with the internet’s governing bodies, the results could be seismic. 

All such steps would spell the end of the internet as a single global communications technology—and perhaps not only temporarily. China and Iran still use the same internet technology as the US and Europe—even if they have access to only some of its services. If such countries set up rival governance bodies and a rival network, only the mutual agreement of all the world’s major nations could rebuild it. The era of a connected world would be over.

ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers which was once an offshoot of the US Department of Commerce now operates as a nongovernmental organization. It is an multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces and numerical spaces of the Internet, ensuring the network's stable and secure operation .It’s CEO Gorän Marby feels that 

the internet is a decentralized system. No one actor has the ability to control it or shut it down,.

The internet’s other governing bodies work in much the same way—they are independent international bodies that work by agreement, not by force. Almost everyone agrees this is a strange and clunky way to run a piece of vital global infrastructure, but no one can agree on a better alternative. 

Trying to agree on new governance for the internet would require the agreement of the world’s nations—something so rare as to be nonexistent in the 21st century. But that does mean the internet is held together by little more than mutual voluntary agreement.

So what would a real splinternet look like in practice? And how close are we to it?

An actual splintering of the internet—rather than different countries using different platforms on the same underlying architecture—could take one of two forms, according to Milton Mueller of the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“A major, serious splintering of the internet would involve a technically incompatible protocol used by a critical mass of the world’s population,” he says. 

This first type of splintering would not be catastrophic. “Technologists would probably find a way to bridge the two protocols in short order,” says Mueller.

The second form of splintering would be to continue using technically compatible protocols, but to have different governing bodies managing those services.  This might prove trickier to reverse.

A splinternet remains very possible—driven by politics rather than technology—but for now, everyone seems keen to hold on and try to nudge the fragile status quo in their favor, not least because it seems that were the internet allowed to fracture, it could prove impossible to repair.