Understanding the splinternet: can the world ever be truly global?

You may already be familiar with the term splinternet, a neologism made up of “split” and “internet”. If you haven’t come across it, you will soon. It already has its own Wikipedia page, which refers to the balkanization of the internet, one that is fragmented and divided as a result of technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion and particular interests.

Wasn’t the dream of the internet to create a global information network, with protocols that made it possible to interconnect any of its nodes? Thanks to its military origins, the internet was designed to be a network capable of interconnecting two points of a network, regardless of the damage it might have suffered, as a way of ensuring that Washington and Los Angeles, for example, could exchange information even if a large part of the nodes of the network linking them had been destroyed. With the incorporation of universities and, later, of practically everything else, the internet became a global information network in which communication and information of all kinds flowed without practically any limits, without the slightest attention to borders: if you could understand the language in which it was written, you could access any content.

What has happened since those early days? What is is the so-called “network of networks” evolving into? Twenty years ago, North Korea built, based on the same internet protocols, its national intranet, known as Kwangmyong, or bright light: like the internet as we know it, its content is accessible via web browsers, has an internal search engine, and offers e-mail and newsgroup services. Only foreigners and a small number of government officials, academics, and elites are allowed to use the global internet in North Korea, making Kwangmyong, a free service for public use, the only network available to the vast majority of North Korean citizens… which is monitored by the government.

Other countries, such as Cuba or Myanmar, use similar systems that are not part of the internet we know. In 2011, a senior Iranian official, Ali Agha-Mohammadi, announced his government’s plans to launch what he called a “halal internet”, in line with the values of Islam, designed to provide “appropriate” services and prevent access to unwanted information, also with its own email service and search engine.

China and its Great Wall is the best known example of an isolated internet: total monitoring of all activity, and a huge censorship system that prevents Chinese citizens from accessing content and services that their government doesn’t want them to. The system, on the one hand, maintains tight social control that qualifies anyone who tries to access what they should not as a dangerous dissident, which you can skip if you are a foreigner or occasional visitor and have a working VPN, but most VPNs are illegal in the country, and although many companies with foreign activity use them, they generally operate in an environment of controlled permissiveness. On the other hand, it has kept the big international competitors out of China and allowed the country to develop domestic copies of their services, and now, big companies that grew in the huge Chinese market and are now looking at international expansion.

Russia forces all service providers on the network to store their data in the country, and has already announced that it has prepared a system that would allow it to disconnect completely from the internet and operate its own version for its citizens.

Meanwhile, Europe, with its laws that seek to dictate how the internet should function, is increasingly leaving out more and more service providers that don’t meet its requirements. If you want access to everything, get yourself a good VPN — something most internet users still don’t have.

Where do we go from here? The answer seems clear: to an internet divided into regions, with access passports and specific rules. Exactly the opposite of its original design. It starts with politics, follows with religion and culture, continues with the alleged dangers… and ends with intolerance. Apparently, the dream of the internet was too beautiful and radical for our world.

The internet is just another failed experiment, proof of what awaits us: separated into tribes with different rites and cultures, humans are completely incapable of responding to the great challenges they face as a species. If we are not even able to communicate through a screen, then one can only imagine how we’re going to deal collectively with the most important challenge we face, the climate emergency.

(En espa?ol, aquí)

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