The Internet does not exist.
What we colloquially refer to as the Internet is just a global network of all networks,
formed by a consensus of voluntary participants.
In a network of computers, devices have to be assigned unique identifiers in order to
be able to find and send information between each other.
If more networks want to make connections, they have to coordinate these unique identifiers
for each device in every connected network.
On the Internet, these unique identifiers are called IP addresses.
Every phone, laptop, website or server has to have one and no two devices or servers
can have the same IP address.
These IP addresses are assigned by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
ICANN is a non-governmental non-profit corporation that works on the basis of voluntary international
consensus.
When ICANN assigns an IP address, voluntary participants agree on that decision and the
IP address is broadcast on the Internet.
Without a body like ICANN to coordinate IP addresses worldwide, there wouldn’t be one
unified global Internet.
While ICANN’s structure is beneficial to everyone that participates in it, there’s
no rule that says countries have to be a part of it.
In an alternate reality, governments could set up national authorities to assign their
own IP addresses that wouldn’t be able to make connections outside of their jurisdiction.
Users would be locked in to access only those addresses governed by their national authority.
And while ICANN makes the Internet function as one unified global network, absence of
such an international consensus mechanism would create a multiverse of parallel Internets
where the concept of reaching anyone across the world would be completely alien.
Many academics are sounding alarms that the death of the unified global Internet is already
happening.
More and more countries are voicing their desire for digital sovereignty and techno-isolationism.
Experts are worried this cyber-balkanization is creating a multi-verse of national Internets
and corporate walled gardens that they refer to as the Splintertnet.
If Internet can be understood as a worldwide network of all networks, Splinternet would
be the opposite of that.
It is when nations stop participating in the ICANN consensus and begin assigning their
own IP addresses.
It is also when governments setup nationwide firewalls to restrict free flow of information
to and from the country.
Both of these trends are already well on their way to create the world’s first Splinternet.
Ukraine, under the invasion from Russia, recently sent a request to ICANN to remove all Russian
IP addresses from the Internet.
This would essentially mean every .ru website and every Russian smartphone or a computer
would disappear from the global Internet.
ICANN rejected Ukraine’s proposal on the basis that it isn’t technically feasible
nor is it their role to punitively eliminate IP addresses from the Internet as a form of
sanctions.
ICANN’s decisions are accepted by a consensus of all Internet operators, which guarantees
no one actor has authority over the other.
The only actor that can effectively shut down Russia’s Internet is Kremlin itself.
But Russian government is preparing for an event just like the one desired by Ukraine.
In 2021, Moscow launched the Russian National Domain Name System, as a rival body to ICANN
whose goal is to be able to continue operating Russian IP addresses even if they were cut
off from the global Internet.
On June 15 and July 15, 2021, Russia tested the new system by disconnecting local ISPs
and telecom providers from the Internet, to see if Russian websites could still run.
According to the official sources, the tests were successful.
The tests are meant to be repeated annually and are a part of a broader initiative to
build a sovereign splinternet dubbed Runet that could function independently of the global
consensus.
A move like this would make Russia’s domestic Internet more resilient.
But if more countries or blocs follow suit, it could start an information cold war.
It would take the form of an internet arms race.
Nations could start feeling encouraged to launch cyberattacks to cripple the other’s
splinternets, because there wouldn’t be a risk of backfire and collateral damage without
the former’s Internet interconnectedness.
Splinternet doesn’t need to wait for newly formed national authorities to disassemble
the global Internet consensus.
Internet edge providers, such as social media and search engines, have become central gate
keepers of much of the content visible to most users.
Some of these services are run by companies with a quasi-infrastructure status.
Amazon Web Services runs cloud operations for many major services with a monopoly nearing
market share.
Google controls anywhere between 70-90% market share.
Facebook owning three major social networking apps doesn’t have an alternative.
Apple with its stranglehold on the iPhone ecosystem has a unilateral control over what
apps or devices are allowed on their platform.
So whenever these companies make a business decision, it can be detrimental to millions
of users.
When Apple decided to remove news media apps apps like Quartz or The New York Times from
the Chinese App Store, it meant that no iPhone user would be able to use these apps and there
was no way to work around it.
Because Android users can install apps from arbitrary sources and not just the Play Store,
Apple’s decision curated a Splinternet for iPhone users in China.
When Amazon decided to curtail its operation in Russia, it meant that Russian customers
would lose access to Amazon’s global market place, cloud service and streaming.
With other companies like Dell, Microsoft, Oracle or Visa, there is now a vacuum of services
that will remain absent or will be provided locally, splintered away from the global Internet.
European Union began pressuring tech companies to not only ban Russian media like RT and
Sputnik, but remove any content from search engines and social media sites repeating their
content.
While anyone can argue that state propagandist media are harmful, the trigger-happy crackdown
on misinformation would only further splinter Europeans from unrestricted access to the
Internet.
Fulfilling the demands for content censorship on social media and search engines is frighteningly
easy.
Facebook and Google have spent years training their algorithms to personalize content on
social media feeds and search results.
Reports revealed that most content users subscribe to will never appear on their feed.
Instead, a number of factors such as your behavior and interactions on the website will
determine what you see.
Google has admitted their algorithm has a filter bubble problem.
A term explaining how algorithmic bias makes different suggestions to individual users
based on variables that are outside of the scope of relevant search queries.
There is no other country where the collusion between corporations and the government managed
to create a more splintered version of the Internet than China.
Since the Chinese government has erected the Great Firewall, Chinese services do not allow
foreign information to flow freely into China.
A newly formed Cyber Administration demands that all citizen’s posts, comments and searches
are tied to their real life identities.
In the effort to erase online anonymity, VPN services and Tor were made illegal in the
country, with companies like Apple happily obliging with the crackdown on online freedoms.
Anyone who sets up a private chat group in China, is legally responsible for all of its
content.
Internet companies are required to monitor and rate the conduct of online users, assigning
them scores following the Communist Party line.
Government censors will ban and remove any app or content that previous censorship mechanisms
wouldn’t take care off.
All foreign social media apps are banned leaving only government-approved Chinese companies
to serve online platforms.
And because everyone in China can only use local services, there is no direct line of
communication between users in China with the rest of the world.
China is currently laying a framework for the New Internet Protocol, a top-down design
for a global network that would be built by the Chinese government and companies.
The differences with the current Internet Protocol are stark.
While the global IP allows anyone to host their own website so long as they have Internet
access and a computer, in China, you would have to apply for a license to do so.
The global Internet is fundamentally leaky – meaning no amount of nationwide firewall
controls can completely seal off their users.
The New IP would hard code access controls into the protocol, to allow the Chinese censors
to restrict devices and networks on an automated basis.
Under the New IP, Internet access would be permissioned and administrators would have
the power to operate a whitelist mode for devices, apps and websites available on the
network.
All data on the New IP would be shared with the government and used to serve AI, Big Data
and machine learning applications.
The Chinese haven’t laid out any specifics on how they want to build the New IP framework.
But if they succeed, they could start offering it as a service to developing nations, expanding
their control on China’s splinternet abroad.
Not many people realize that they are able to access the Internet, because their Internet
Service Provider gave them that permission.
As you are paying your monthly Internet bill, you are paying to use your carrier’s pipes
and cables they’ve spent billions of dollars laying down into the ground.
But if at any point, global ISPs no longer exchange each other connections, the value
of your Internet bill goes down to zero very fast.
The trust in the telecommunication providers is the core of the issue.
We are carrying and using devices capable of high-bandwidth wireless transmission without
ever touching telephone pipes.
Our devices could communicate with each other in a peer-to-peer manner even if the government
shut down the Internet for the whole country.
This is where the solution to the Splinternet lies.
If we can create our own mesh network of peer-to-peer connections with every phone, tablet or a
PC within reach, we wouldn’t have to rely on ground wires as much.
The only limitation would be intercontinental communication and extremely remote areas.
But that could be solved if people were allowed to beam Internet down from the sky with drones
or satellites.
But cities and more densely populated countries should already be capable of achieving this.
There are two projects that I am following closely for this purpose, although they are
not quite there.
Briar and Cwtch are building peer-to-peer networks that don’t need the Internet to
work at all.
They can use Bluetooth and WiFi, use Tor and end-to-end encryption to protect the privacy
and anonymity of participants.
Neither of these are mesh networks, as they do not route traffic.
But the first peer-to-peer network that begins offering mesh routing would be our best chance
to create a truly permissionless, neutral and consent-based Internet that can’t be
taken down by any single authority.
So as the governments are trying to replace the unified global Internet with Splinternet,
we can start building an entirely new uncontrollable Internet from scratch.