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The Internet Technology

The Splinternet Is Growing (fortune.com) 169

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," said Internet pioneer John Gilmore in a 1993 Time magazine article about a then-ungoverned place called "cyberspace." How times have changed. From a report: In April, Sri Lankan authorities blocked its citizens' access to social media sites like Facebook and YouTube following a major terrorist attack. Such censorship, once considered all but inconceivable, is now commonplace in a growing number of countries. Russia, for instance, approved an "Internet sovereignty" law in May that gives the government broad power to dictate what its citizens can see online. And China is not just perfecting its "Great Firewall," which blocks such things as searches for "Tiananmen Square" and the New York Times, but is seeking to export its top-down version of the web to countries throughout Southeast Asia.

This phenomenon, colloquially called "splinternet," whereby governments seek to fence off the World Wide Web into a series of national Internets, isn't new. The term, also known as cyberbalkanization, has been around since the 1990s. But lately the rupturing has accelerated, as companies censor their sites to comply with national rules and governments blot out some sites entirely. "It feels like a chunk of the Internet is gone or different. People feel the Internet is not as we knew it," says Venkat Balasubramani, who runs a cyber law firm in Seattle. Technology is one reason for the change. According to Danny O'Brien of the digital civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, the sort of censorship tools deployed by China were enormously expensive and labor-Âintensive. But now, as the tools become cheaper and more efficient, other countries are willing to try them too. Meanwhile, there is a new political will among governments to try to control websites -- especially following events like the Arab Spring, during which Facebook and Twitter helped fuel political uprisings.
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The Splinternet Is Growing

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  • Meanwhile in the West we cheer on Cancel Culture as people with Wrongthink are driven off social media or any other platform that may find listeners/viewers.

    But our internet is "free" right? right?

    • Re:Are we any less guilty (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bit trollent ( 824666 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @12:31PM (#58672786) Homepage

      You are free to create a website which contains any content you choose, and excludes content you don't want.

      For example you can create a website that includes vacation pictures and excludes neo-Nazi propaganda.

      • But running a website (especially one with a large following) isn't free. The people driving off "undesirable" opinions from social media will also troll advertisers until they pull their ads from your site, taking away your income.

        • ...will also troll advertisers until they pull their ads from your site, taking away your income.

          Making income is NOT the point of the internet. The cost for me to create my own site to provide open information/opinion to the world is nearly zero. Trying to make money from advertising is what's making the internet a worse place to visit.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Isn't that how the market fixes everything?

        • If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...

          Pretty lame sig, man. If construction was like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the security of an entire building. Oh, wait, that is already exactly like programming.

          • No. If you want to go that way, then an incorrectly fitted faucet would bring down the security of the entire building. In fact, a manufacturing defect in that faucet could cause that. Think about it: weird little errors in 3rd party libraries, a weakness in the OS your app runs on, or a mistake in a memcpy implementation can cause security issues. In programming, security must be considered at all times, not just when writing the login screen or auth routines.

        • Welcome to the same life that everyone else has. You can't print pamphlets for free. Even Thomas Paine had that problem.

          If USA hasn't turned out to be the leftist paradise that you had hoped for, have you thought about moving to Russia? I heard they had some kind of free-life-expenses experiment going on, but it's not clear they kept it going after the early 1990s.

        • Freedom isn't free.

        • But running a website (especially one with a large following) isn't free.

          I pay less than $30/year for domain registration and hosting. If I had a large following, I'd have to use a static site in order to handle a lot of visitors on that grade of hosting, and watch my bandwidth consumption, but I could express myself to basically any number of visitors if I could do it textually — and I can.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You're missing the point. The problem isn't freedom from the government censoring websites, the worst kind of censorship is the self censorship people have to do to fit in.

        The problem is currently with the culture itself, specifically a small, vocal group of lefto-facists that seek to shut down anything that doesn't fit in their own, narrow, world view. From about 10,000 feet, it's not really all that diss-similar in effect to China directly censoring websites, it's just the technique is different.

        • well, more to the point, the motivation is the same, and if the group you are referring to, gains sufficient political power , there can be no doubt the techniques will also fallow.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 )
        Yes, but this has gone farther than that, and it has exposed one of the problems with the way the internet as a whole is run. We've given private companies control basically every level of the internet, from services, hosting, DNS registration, even the backbone networks themselves, with no real rules on who they can turn away. We've seen private sites knocked offline by there hosts and registrars being targeted by social media mobs. They've even tried to go after ISPs and backbone providers to get sites th

        • Now, what has been lost so far, well, I certainly won't miss.

          To me this is the biggest problem. What has been kicked off so far, is generally mindless tripe. Even though this makes the issue seem trivial, it's an indicator the problem is quite serious.

          When stuff that is outright absurd (think Alex Jones Gay Frogs) is banned, pointless mindless stuff, it means that anything can be banned because the reasons apparently can be utterly trivial. It means nothing is safe from banning eventually if you can simp

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mccrew ( 62494 )

            It means nothing is safe from banning eventually if you can simply convince a few people to be aggrieved by it, and means that ANYTHING can be shown to cause offense, no matter how stupid.

            And so what? These are private platforms. They don't owe you, or me, or Alex Jones a platform. While the providers hide behind terms of service, realistically any of us could be shown the door at any time, for any reason - real or imagined. Don't make the classic fallacy of equating your freedom of speech as a mandate for a private third party to provide you with a soap box.

            Government throwing undesirables off a platform, a-la China? That would be a big problem. But that's not the issue here.

            For my tw

      • The problem is that anyone to the right of Mao Zedong looks like a Nazi to you. Eoin Lenihan was just banned today for this piece exposing blue check mark journalists colluding with violent political extremists. http://quillette.com/2019/05/2... [quillette.com]

      • Except that with the new Internet laws, you're not.

        The company hosting your website is legally responsible for its content, therefore no company will accept to host any disruptive content whose legality may be in question or which is disliked by big enough pressure groups which would expose it to any unnecessary trouble.

        Even for something as mainstream as porn, you cannot use normal hosting and need to seek special services that are priced much higher.

        The Internet where anyone could put some content is gone

      • It's inevitable , ageing population, scared, new population, tek-savvy ... it's a generation war and no one seems to be doing anything to fix that

    • Not "we". It's leftists pushing for censorship. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It is not factual to say that "we" in the West support censorship. It's not "we" who are pushing for it. It's leftists who are the ones doing that.

      Silicon Valley has perhaps the highest concentration of leftists in the entire US. It's there where we see online censorship originate, be encouraged, and then happen.

      Censorship is an integral part of leftism. This is because leftist ideals can't stand on their own. The entire ideology quickly falls apart when subjected to even the slightest scrutiny.

      That shouldn

      • I agree with what the OP says. In fact, I would like to add...

        BANNED

      • I have to wonder what your definition of 'leftist' is. The term has become so vague now, it often just means 'anyone I don't like.'

        I could give you a great many examples of right-wing advocates of censorship, but it wouldn't mean anything more than your own empty assertions.

      • When idiots like you confuse individual economic freedom with "censorship" and "leftists," I start to wonder if it is time to rebuild America's insane asylums.

        Companies are banning you from their private platforms because you're bad for business. Corporations are not "leftist."

        It is like the age-old battle between the Immovable Ignorance and Unstoppable Stupidity.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hylandr ( 813770 )

      This guy was downvoted but he's spot on.

      Having any social media account these days is dangerous to free-thinking individuals that call the insane out on their bullshit.

      Put in less sanguine terms there are groups of people that identify themselves as self-appointed social justice warriors that will reach out and quash the livelihoods of anyone that doesn't believe in whatever outrage of the day happens to be.

      So what happens to these people? They leave social and pursue other healthier activities that doesn't

    • Me believing in Freedom never meant that you're welcome in my home. Never.

      My Press, My Freedom.

      Get your own damn press.

  • Thank you Eternal Septemberers! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    You were so well suited to be AOL users, it's a shame you came over.

    I hope you suffocate on your AirPods and your dicks fall off.

  • Most people forget that regardless of how many VPNs and Tor nodes you use, your government still needs to allow your ISP to provide you with access to the real internet (instead of a whitelisted subset of it). Because the government owns or regulates the physcial wires that go from the country's borders to your house.

    • True to some extent, but the internet brings many things that governments desire too, so few take it away completely. You end up with a hacker-vs-hacker battle between the government censors and the activists trying to find new ways to get around the filters.

    • Because the government owns or regulates the physcial wires that go from the country's borders to your house.

      This is mostly not true in the US. You'll find that there are no regulations of the wires. There is regulation of telephone communications. There is regulation of corporations.

      There is some regulation of internet service providers themselves, but this is mostly in the area of truth in advertising, not discriminating, etc. Just regular sorts of regulations that apply to selling things to the public. And to the extent that the FCC does regulate ISPs, it is only the legal entity selling the "last mile" consu

  • The US is fencing off technologies and science

    • The budget for science has not decreased in the U.S. The amount of science majors has not decreased. What you mean to say is that leftists in the U.S. started politicizing sciences and some people said enough with that.

      Science is supposed to be about free open and open and debate. That means anything can be challenged. Even climate change. This means you are supposed to way the evidence and case by case, and admit when something is odd. The original hypothesis can be altered and improved.

      Instead, people

  • Uh, no. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by apoc.famine ( 621563 ) <apoc.famine@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @12:41PM (#58672868) Journal

    It feels like a chunk of the Internet is gone or different. People feel the Internet is not as we knew it,

    Then they never knew the internet. For them, "the internet" was likely social media and maybe Wikipedia.

    People who "know the internet" still have full access to it in those countries.

  • Let's get this done. Cut the cables, destroy the links. Let every country have their own intranet. Global internet has been a catastrophe.

    If WW3 happens, I will firmly blame it on the global internet and the wealth of misinformation contained therein.

    Someday, humanity will be ready to be connected in this way, but we're not right now. In it's current form, the internet is just as much an existential threat to our societies as climate change or nuclear weapons, IMHO.

  • Remember, near field communications allows even small devices that resemble your luggage tags and wheels to contain terabytes of data, which one relocated inside the wire, will be visible. They're pretty cheap, too. More fun to hook them up to the power supply, which has bidirectional data flows, though.

  • Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ilsaloving ( 1534307 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @01:05PM (#58673052)

    The internet was fantastic as long as everyone could trust that they'd be on an even playing field. Sure, there was corruption issues with ICANN, etc, but that's going to happen anywhere.

    But the moment the US started rattling it's sabre and trying to exert political control over key regulation bodies, the writing was on the wall that balkanization would accelerate quickly. The rest of the world simply no longer trusts the US to be an honest stewart of the internet.

    To be honest, I'm impressed that the internet lasted as long as it did. It's turned into a vicious wild west, with various countries (like China and Russia) exacerbating the problem rather than taking steps to make it safer.

    • "moment the US started rattling" ... you mean over the monolith that developed from the U.S. funded DARPA net project?
      I can't imagine no one saw that coming.

    • Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bjdevil66 ( 583941 ) on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @01:44PM (#58673246)

      But the moment the US started rattling it's sabre and trying to exert political control over key regulation bodies,

      The real issue was when we lost our trust in the American government to not spy on everyone by default. We built the internet. We OWNED the internet. We were the one alleged beacon of light and freedom that could be trusted by the rest of the world to run the thing - and we threw that idealism out the window after 9/11.

      When Edward Snowden blew the lid off of the NSA's programs (along with Wikileaks, etc.), the USA could no longer be 100% trusted that we would be honest and fair with the internet for all. That shortsighted spying was a bigger blow to the free internet than any Great Firewall or other forms of online censorship.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Really, US bashing? Stop coddling foreign dictators just because the US was caught red handed spying on civilians also.

      Despite the unconstitutional spying, censorship hasn't been a prevalent thing in the US and the laws that the US seeks to enforce are generally not considered totalitarian in nature.

      So far the worst offenses in the US seem to be the use of foreign spying powers by the Obama administration to spy on the Trump campaign without much merit.

      Compare that with countries that are completely block

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The internet was fantastic as long as everyone could trust that they'd be on an even playing field. Sure, there was corruption issues with ICANN, etc, but that's going to happen anywhere.

      But the moment the US started rattling it's sabre and trying to exert political control over key regulation bodies, the writing was on the wall that balkanization would accelerate quickly. The rest of the world simply no longer trusts the US to be an honest stewart of the internet.

      To be honest, I'm impressed that the internet lasted as long as it did. It's turned into a vicious wild west, with various countries (like China and Russia) exacerbating the problem rather than taking steps to make it safer.

      The US??? Please!

      China and Russia are obviously not angling to be MORE honest stewards of their respective corners of the Internet, so what could the US have done differently to prevent them?

      If the US was the most honorable honest and perfectly ideal steward of the Internet, China and Russia would still have their exact same motivations. Increasing Balkanization of the Internet has nothing to do with US control of the Internet other than US control is not Chinese or Russian control, and that's all there is

  • Let's turn the governments' argument "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" around, and say "if the government has nothing to hide, they should not fear the information on the Internet".

    However unlike everyday citizens they would like to surveil, most governments indeed have things to hide. They would outright do nasty stuff, including here in US (to a lesser degree though).

    So they would like a one way street Internet, where end-to-end encryption is banned, and information is subject to

  • Govt. security agencies have always sought to monitor & control so called "free speech." The USA is just as hostile to divergent groups & against free speech, e.g. COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. Look at any country closely enough & you'll find similar govt. security agency behaviour. This is not east vs. west, socialist vs. capitalist, or anything of the sort. All we're seeing now is the inevitable dropping of the illusion that the main purpose for govts to support the internet is

  • This "censorship" is being built into existing systems by US based whore corporations kowtowing for access to nation populations.
    The "Great Firewall of China" for example is a version of Google search built by Google so that China would allow them access.
    https://www.pressherald.com/20... [pressherald.com]
    It's no different from all the US carriers sharing all calls and texts with US Government spy agencies.

    • Sorry Ivan, you did not comprehend the technical details in the news article you linked to.

      What it says is that Google was building a version of their search engine that would comply with the restrictions of the Great Firewall, presumably connecting to some sort of internal API for ISPs that they use.

      It does not suggest that Google helped to build the Great Firewall.

      English is like, hard and stuff, man.

  • Hopefully Satellite Internet will help workaround issues. That or bouncing a signal off of the LEO satellites Musk is putting up.
  • "Meanwhile, there is a new political will among governments to try to control websites -- especially following events like the Arab Spring, during which Facebook and Twitter helped fuel political uprisings."

    The converse is also true. The rise of the populist right all over the world (Putin, Brexit, Trump, Modi, Duterte, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, et al) is pretty much due to the proliferate use of social media for fake news and propaganda.

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