Malcomson - Splinternet: How Geopolitics and Commerce are Fragmenting the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is slowly returning to Earth and its entanglements: states, laws, cultures. Cyberspace, for a host of commercial and political reasons, is becoming many cyberspaces, some of which fit distressingly well onto the old political maps of nation-states. The web has even become a battleground for states wars. Why is this happening, and what will remain of the old, free, and anarchic web to take into the future?

Digital computing, the Internet, and eventually the web were invented and grew as part of a long line of government projects, mainly military ones, dating back to the First World War. But, beginning in the late 1960s, the Internet and geek culture split off from government, launching a period of spectacular innovation, excitement, and profit. The web became a place for enacting dreams of freedom.

Cyberspace was understood as extra-terrestrial, at once politically rebellious and apolitical, where you could have no identity at all and yet every identity was respected: the last of the great 1960s projects. No one can surpass the famous description by John Perry Barlow, who dashed off a declaration of cyber-independence while attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in February 1996, less than a year after the first easily accessible web browser, Mosaic, reached the public:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear . Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion .

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Barlows transcendent triumphalism complemented the more earthly triumphalism that flourished after the ending of the Cold War, the globalizing consensus optimism that Davos nurtured and celebrated. The web as a solvent of sovereignty had a very strong appeal, and was soon taken up by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, a fixture at Davos, in his 1999 bestseller The Lexus and the Olive Tree:

The symbol of the Cold War system was a wall, which divided everyone. The symbol of the globalization system is a World Wide Web, which unites everyone . In the Cold War we reached for the hot line between the White House and the Kremlina symbol that we were all divided but at least someone, the two superpowers, were in charge. In the era of globalization we reach for the Interneta symbol that we are all connected but nobody is totally in charge.

Not totally: the United States remained a good deal more in charge than any other power, which is what led French foreign minister Hubert Vdrine, in pondering the singularity of Americas victory, to his rather bitter coinage hyperpowerlike a superpower, only more so. In particular, the United States was in charge of the Internet, which had been developed, like so much else in the twentieth century, including (for the most part) digital computing itself, by the US military to serve US military purposes.

Then why did Barlow and Friedman, and nearly every other writer on the subject, not dwell on, or draw conclusions from, the World Wide Webs terrestrial past? In part, it was because their boomer generation rarely chose to take lessons from their parents experience. In part, it was because something so exhilaratingly futuristic could only be dragged down by a consideration of its past, and the thrill of the postCold War period was in creating a future that had as little reference to the miserable past as possible. Besides, the Cold War victory had been military only in the very specific sense that one sides military had out-spent and, most important, out-innovated the other sides military; the rest of the victory, the bulk of it, was political and economic, not military. So what did it matter if the Internet had once been a military program?

But the strongest reason for neglecting the past of the Internet was that this old military project had in fact been superbly re-purposed by a trans-national engineering subculture that followed its own rules, and by a San Francisco Bay Area culture of the late 1960s and 1970s that was highly individualistic and even libertarian, unsympathetic at best to the demands of the state and sovereignty, generally pacifist, and animated by a One World view of its own. That is why it seemed as though the web might be the one 1960s project that could succeed in breaking free of the past and burying the nation-state system. You have no sovereignty where we gather Our identities have no bodies

Has the past caught up with the web? From Russian cyberattacks and the Stuxnet virus to chronic cyberthievery from China and industrial-scale invasions of privacy, the web seems to be returning to its roots in conflict and nation-state rivalries. Giant web companies both hasten this nationalizationas they tailor products to ever more specific marketsand rebel against it as a barrier to their trans-border ambitions. Meanwhile, anxious states, fearing their economic and military dependence on the web and the vulnerability of their digital information, devote funds and political capital to fighting cryptography, building Great Firewalls, and creating back doors.

Twenty years on, looking back on his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Barlow said, I could also see there was never a better system [than the web] that could inherently be extended for surveillance. Ever. I knew that. I wasnt stupid. I just wanted to pretend that was not the future. That is unfair to the future. Without doubt, the web is and will be used for surveillance and for the projection of force, just as its forebears were. States and like-minded regions will assert control over it and most users experience of it will be locally inflected. At the same time, the web will continue to have a global infrastructure and no one state will be able to dominate it, both because the other states wont let that happen and because the leading companies on the web will not abandon their drive for global growth. The web will be neither entirely united nor entirely divided. The web is a global private marketplace built on a government platform, not unlike the global airport system. That is more mundane than the early ecstasies of cyberspace, but it is more durable. And if the prophecies of cyberwar are someday fulfilled, at the end of the battle the airports will still be rebuilt. People will always want to fly.