[liberationtech] What do you all think of Ms. Ovide's analysis?

[Yosem Companys]

The global internet is a mirage

By Shira Ovide, NYT tech journalist

The U.S. government’s proposed ban on Chinese apps like TikTok and WeChat
plays into technologists’ fears that the internet utopia is crumbling.

The worry is that instead of a world brought closer together by the
internet, a tech fight between the United States and China threatens to
further splinter the digital world along country borders.

I share those concerns. But let me explain why a splintered internet isn’t
so novel, or necessarily a horrible thing.

First, the internet was never as global or interconnected as the ideal.
What we mean when we talk about a unified global internet is a history in
which the internet was dominated by America, with U.S. companies and U.S.
values infusing the world. The exception was China, which operated a
parallel internet world.

For years, foreign governments at times pushed back at the American-tinged
internet. They sometimes had understandable reasons. Germany, for example,
has strong norms of personal privacy and strict rules against denial of the
Holocaust. That has resulted in conflict with the American internet
companies’ standards of personal data collection and free expression.

Other times, governments have imposed restrictions on online activity to
silence opposition from their own citizens. Whether or not we agree with
such tactics, the internet has never been a single global blob where
borders didn’t matter.

And do we want it to be? I’m an American, and I prefer our relatively
freewheeling internet to what exists in Russia or Vietnam. But I also
recognize that each country has its own tax codes, labor laws and auto
safety regulations. When Ford makes car bumpers, it has to figure out how
to alter designs to meet different safety rules in Italy and Nigeria.

There are technical reasons that it’s trickier to make country-to-country
rules about a website than the strength of car bumpers. But the idea of
internet policy changing when you go from Brazil to Argentina is not crazy.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing to worry about. I’m concerned that
banning apps, writing laws restricting what people can say online or
shutting down internet access entirely costs people digital lifelines to
the outside world, and that the internet is one more way for authoritarian
regimes to exert dominance.

But it’s not productive to pine for a utopian internet that never really
existed. When technologists lament the fracturing of the internet world, I
wonder if what they’re really mourning is the fracturing of the world,
period.
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