… and technology divided the world

Another week goes by that seems to take us further away from the dream of an internet free of borders, uniting the planet, and instead the world is now increasingly divided between China and the United States, locked in a deepening trade war where anything goes.

The arrest and subsequent release on bail in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of the founder of Huawei, followed by Donald Trump’s bizarre suggestion that he would be willing to exchange her freedom for better conditions in a trade agreement with China exceeds the limits of what we have understood politics to be about, endangering any US executive with plans to travel to China, where two Canadian nationals have already been arrested in what clearly seems a tit-for-tat escalation of the conflict.

Eric Schmidt’s predictions of an internet divided into two or even three zones, one managed by China, another mainly by the United States and another, possibly, by the European Union, based on legal framework (despite its notable technological deficiencies), seem to be coming true.

China is evolving as an utterly separate ecosystem, with Huawei clearly positioned as a key player in the development of its infrastructure and an online shopping scene with its own leaders, and who are growing stronger internationally. China is developing into an environment that from the West is seen as dystopian and Orwellian, its industry driven by robots — a third of all industrial robots acquired in the world in 2017 were installed in China — along with developments largely unreported outside the country: want to see online shopping delivered by drones? Forget Amazon or the West, look to rural China. 5G developments? No doubt where you’ll see them first.

Can the United States prevent China from controlling the next generation of the internet, going on to play a role similar to that of the United States in its early days? In contrast to a theoretically free internet dominated by the United States, where everything is seemingly allowed and where anything, however abhorrent it may appear, can be broadcast or published (despite growing callsfor oversight not only by governments, but also by companies and main players), the “clean and righteous” internet advocated by China wants to prevent its population from seeing anything that might be considered a possible bad influence, while at the same time closely monitoring what people get up to online.

On one side, discussions about tolerance, about what should or should not be allowed and whether we should exclude from the network those who violate certain basic principles; on the other side, there is no discussion.

Two sides using the internet to spy on each other, offering very different models, and that intend to expand their influence and set the development agenda of societies all over the world.

As the Chinese say, we live in interesting times. Who would have thought two decades ago that this is where we’d find ourselves….

(En espa?ol, aquí)