by Jared Cohen
Ideology and religious morals are likely to be the strongest drivers of these collaborations. They are already the strongest drivers of censorship today. Imagine if a group of deeply conservative Sunni-majority countries—say, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria and Mauritania—formed an online alliance around their common values and strategic needs and decided to build a “Sunni Web.” While technically this Sunni Web would still be part of the larger Internet, it would become the main source of information, news, history and activity for citizens living in these countries. For years, the development and spread of the Internet was highly determined by its English-only language standard, but the continued implementation of internationalized domain names (IDN), which allow people to use and access domain names written in non-Roman alphabet characters (e.g., http://), is changing this. The creation of a Sunni Web—indeed, all nationalized Internets—becomes more likely if its users can access a version of the Internet in their own language and script.
Within the Sunni Web, depending on who participated and who led its development, the Internet could be sharia-complicit: e-commerce and e-banking would look different, since no one would be allowed to charge interest; religious police might monitor online speech, working together with domestic law enforcement to report violations; websites with gay or lesbian content would be uniformly blocked; women’s movements online might somehow be curtailed; and ethnic and religious minority groups might find themselves closely monitored, restricted or even excluded. In this scenario, how possible it would be for a local tech-savvy citizen to circumvent this Internet and reach the global World Wide Web depends on which country he lived in: Mauritania might not have the desire or capacity to stop him, but Saudi Arabia probably would. If the Mauritanian government became concerned that its users were bypassing the Sunni Web, on the other hand, surely one of its new digital partners could help it build higher fences. Within collective editing alliances, the less paranoid states would allow their populations to access both versions of the Internet (somewhat like an opt-in parental control for television), betting on user preference for safe and uniquely tailored content instead of using brute force.
There will be some instances where autocratic and democratic nations edit the web together. Such a collaboration will typically happen when a weaker democracy is in a neighborhood of stronger autocratic states that coerce it to make the same geopolitical compromises online that it makes in the physical world. This is one of the rare instances where physical proximity actually matters in virtual affairs. For example, Mongolia is a young democracy with an open Internet, sandwiched between Russia and China—two large countries with their own unique and restrictive Internet policies. The former Mongolian prime minister Sukhbaatar Batbold explained to us that he wants Mongolia, like any country, to have its own identity. This means, he said, it must have good relations with its neighbors to keep them from meddling in Mongolian affairs. “We respect that each country has chosen for itself its own path in development,” he said. With China, “we have an understanding where we stay out of Tibet, Taiwan and Dalai Lama issues, and they do not interfere with our issues. The same applies with Russia, with which we have a long-standing relationship.”
A neutral stance of noninterference is more easily sustainable in the physical world. Virtual space significantly complicates this model because online, it’s people who control the activity. People sympathetic to opposition groups and ethnic minorities within China and Russia would look at Mongolia as an excellent place to congregate. Supporters of the Uighurs, Tibetans or Chechen rebels might seek to use Mongolia’s Internet space as a base from which to mobilize, to wage online campaigns and build virtual movements. If that happened, the Mongolian government would no doubt feel the pressure from China and Russia, not just diplomatically but because its national infrastructure is not built to withstand a cyber assault from either neighbor. Seeking to please its neighbors and preserve its own physical and virtual sovereignty, Mongolia might find it necessary to abide by a Chinese or Russian mandate and filter Internet content associated with hot-button issues. In such a compromise, the losers would be the Mongolians, whose online freedom would be taken away as a result of self-interested foreign powers with sharp elbows.
Not all states will look to collaborate with others during the balkanization process, but the end result just the same will be a jumble of national Internets and virtual borders. The trend toward globalized platforms like Facebook and Google creates a system for technology that is more likely to spread, which will mean a broader distribution of engineering tools that people can use to build their own online structures. Without state regulation that inhibits innovation, this growth trend will happen very rapidly. In the early stages, users won’t realize when they are on another country’s Internet because the experience will be seamless, as it is today. While states work to carve out their autonomy in the online world, most users will experience very little change.
That homeostasis, however, will not last. What started as the World Wide Web will begin to look more like the world itself, full of internal divisions and divergent interests. Some form of visa requirement will emerge on the Internet. This could be done quickly and electronically, as a method to contain the flow of information in both directions, requiring that users register and agree to certain conditions to access a country’s Internet. If China decides that all outsiders need to have a visa to access the Chinese Internet, citizen engagement, international business operations and investigative reporting will all be seriously affected. This, along with internal restrictions of the Internet, suggests a twenty-first-century equivalent of Japan’s famous sakoku (“locked country”) policy of near-total isolation enacted in the seventeenth century.
Some states may implement visa requirements as both a monitoring tool for international visitors and as a revenue-generating exercise—a very small fee would be charged automatically upon entering a country’s virtual space, even more if one’s online activities (which the government could track by cookies and other tools) violated the terms of the visa. Virtual visas would appear in response to security threats related to cyber attacks; if your IP came from a blacklisted country, you would encounter heightened screenings and monitoring.
Some states, however, would make a public show of not requiring visas to demonstrate their commitment to open data and to encourage other states to follow their example. In 2010, Chile became the first country in the world to approve a law that guarantees net neutrality. About half of Chile’s 17 million people are online today, and as the country continues to develop its technological infrastructure, public statements like this will no doubt endear Chile to other governments that support its forward-looking communication policies. Countries coming online now will weigh the Chilean model against others. They might be asked to sign no-visa commitments with other states in order to build trade relations around e-commerce and other online platforms, like a Schengen Agreement (Europe’s borderless zone) for the virtual world.
Under conditions like these, the world will see its first Internet asylum seeker. A dissident who can’t live freely under an autocratic Internet and is refused access to other states’ Internets will choose to seek physical asylum in another country to gain virtual freedom on its Internet. There could be a form of interim virtual asylum, where the host country would share sophisticated proxy and circumvention tools that would allow the dissident to connect outside. Being granted virtual asylum could be a significant first step toward physical asylum, a sign of trust without the full commitment. Virtual asylum would serve as an extra layer of vetting before the physical asylum case reached the courts.
Virtual asylum will not work, however, if the ultimate escalation occurs: the creation of an alternative domain name system (DNS), or even aggressive and ubiquitous tampering with it to advance state interests. Today, the Internet as we know it uses the DNS to match computers and devices to relevant data sources, translating IP addresses (numbers) into readable names and vice versa. The robust
ness of the Internet depends on all computers and networks’ using the same official DNS root (run by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN), which contains all the top-level domains that appear as suffixes on web addresses—.edu, .com, .net and others.
But there are alternative DNS roots in existence, operating in parallel with the Internet but not attached to it. Within tech circles, most believe that the creation of an alternative DNS would go against everything the Internet represents and was built to do: namely, share information freely. No government has yet achieved an alternative system,3 but if a government succeeded in doing so, it would effectively unplug its population from the global Internet and instead offer only a closed, national intranet. In technical terms, this would entail creating a censored gateway between a given country and the rest of the world, so that a human proxy could facilitate external data transmissions when absolutely necessary—for matters involving state resources, for instance.
For the population, popular proxy measures like VPNs and Tor would no longer have any effect because there wouldn’t be anything to connect to. It’s the most extreme version of what technologists call a walled garden. On the Internet, a walled garden refers to a browsing environment that controls a user’s access to information and services online. (This concept is not limited to discussions of censorship; it has deep roots in the history of Internet technology: AOL and CompuServe, Internet giants for a time, both started as walled gardens.) For the full effect of disconnection, the government would also instruct the routers to fail to advertise the IP addresses of websites—unlike DNS names, IP addresses are immutably tied to the sites themselves—which would have the effect of putting those websites on a very distant island, utterly unreachable. Whatever content existed on this national network would circulate only internally, trapped like a cluster of bubbles in a computer screen saver, and any attempts to reach users on this network from the outside would meet a hard stop. With the flip of a switch, an entire country would simply disappear from the Internet.
This is not as crazy as it sounds. It was first reported in 2011 that the Iranian government’s plan to build a “halal Internet” was under way, and more than a year later it seemed that the official launch was imminent. The regime’s December 2012 launch of Mehr, its own version of YouTube with “government-approved videos,” added yet another data point that the regime was serious about the project. Details of the plan remained hazy, but according to Iranian government officials, in the first phase the national “clean” Internet would exist in tandem with the global Internet for Iranians (heavily censored as it is), then it would come to replace the global Internet altogether. This would entail moving all the “halal” websites to a particular block of IP addresses, which would make it trivially easy to filter out websites that are outside the halal block. The government and affiliated institutions would provide the content for the national intranet, either gathering it from the global web and scrubbing it, or creating it manually. All activity on the network would be closely monitored, facilitated by the government’s top-level infrastructure control and agency over software (something Iranian officials are very concerned about, judging from a 2012 ban on the import of foreign computer security software). Iran’s head of economic affairs told the country’s state-run news agency that they hoped their halal Internet would come to replace the web in other Muslim countries, too—at least those with Farsi speakers. Pakistan has pledged to build something similar.
It is possible that Iran’s threat is merely a hoax. How exactly the state intends to proceed with this project is unclear both technically and politically. How would it avoid enraging the sizable chunk of its population that has access to the Internet? Some believe it would be impossible to fully disconnect Iran from the global Internet because of its broad economic reliance on external connections. Others speculate that, if it wasn’t able to build an alternative root system, Iran could pioneer a dual-Internet model that other repressive states would want to follow. Whichever route Iran chooses, if it is successful in this endeavor, its halal Internet would surpass the Great Firewall of China as the single most extreme version of information censorship in history. It would change the Internet as we know it.
Virtual Multilateralism
In parallel with these balkanization efforts, we will see the rise of virtual multilateralism based on ideological or political solidarity, involving both states and corporations working together in official alliances. States like Belarus, Eritrea, Zimbabwe and North Korea—authoritarian, with strong personality cults and a pariah status elsewhere in the world—would have little to lose by joining an autocratic cyber union, where censorship and monitoring strategies and technologies could be shared. As these countries collaborated to build virtual-age police states, it would become increasingly difficult for Western companies, from a public-relations standpoint, to conduct business there, even if it was legal. This would create space for non-Western companies, whose shareholders may have fewer qualms and who are used to working in similar environments, to play a more active business role within a network of autocratic states.
It’s no accident, for example, that the company that owns 75 percent of North Korea’s only official mobile network, Koryolink, is the Egyptian telecom Orascom, a firm that thrived under the long reign of Hosni Mubarak. (The other 25 percent is owned by North Korea’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.) For North Korean subscribers, Koryolink service is a walled garden, a highly limited platform that allows for only basic functionality. Koryolink users can’t make or receive international calls; nor can they access the Internet. (Some people can access the North Korean intranet, an odd pastiche of online content, mostly propaganda, that government officials transfer over from the Internet.) Local phone calls and text messages are almost certainly monitored, and The Economist reported that the network is already a platform for the dissemination of government propaganda, with the North Korean daily Rodong Sinmun sending users the latest news by text message. While it is not officially a requirement, most people are “encouraged” to pay their phone bills in euros (which are unofficially in circulation), a tall order for most North Koreans. Even so, the demand for phones was so great that adoption soared in the country, leaping from three hundred thousand subscribers to more than a million within an eighteen-month period ending in early 2012. Koryolink’s gross operating margin of 80 percent means big business for Orascom.
In Iran, following a very public crackdown on the country’s green movement in 2009, Western technology companies like Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) sought to distance themselves from the regime. In their absence, the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei swept in and seized the opportunity to dominate the large (and state-controlled) Iranian mobile market. While its Western predecessors faced a backlash at home for selling products to the Iranian government that were used to track and suppress democracy activists, Huawei actively promoted its products in an authoritarian-friendly light. Its catalog was unapologetic, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal, with products like location-based tracking equipment for law enforcement (recently purchased by Iran’s largest mobile operator) and a censorship-friendly mobile news service. Huawei’s favorite domestic partner in Iran, Zaeim Electronic Industries Co., is also the favorite of government branches, including the Revolutionary Guards and the office of the president.
Officially, Huawei claims to offer Zaeim only “commercial public-use products and services,” but according to The Wall Street Journal, in off-the-record pitch meetings with Iranian officials, Huawei made clear its expertise in information censorship, mastered in China. (Huawei published a press release shortly after the story’s publication denying several of its assertions, and a month later stated that it would “voluntarily restrict” its business operations in Iran due to the “increasingly complex situation.”)
In response to these collaborations between autocratic countries, democratic states will want to build similar alliance
s and public-private partnerships to promote a more open Internet with greater political, economic and social freedom. One goal will be to contain the spread of highly restrictive filtering and monitoring technologies to countries with low but growing Internet penetration. This could manifest itself in many different strategies, including bilateral assistance packages with specific preconditions and making an open Internet a premier policy objective for a country’s ambassadors. There could also be transnational campaigns to change the international legal framework around free expression and open-source software. The shared, “bigger picture” goals of these states—access to information, freedom of expression, and transparency—would trump the minor policy or cultural differences between them, creating a kind of revived Hanseatic League of connectivity. The Hanseatic League wielded collective power across Northern Europe from the thirteenth century through the fifteenth through its economic alliances between adjacent city-states; its contemporary equivalent could be based on similar principles of mutual assistance but in a far larger, globalized version. No longer will alliances rely so heavily on geography; everything is equidistant in virtual space. If Uruguay and Benin find cause to work together, it will be easier to do so than ever before.
Part of defending freedom of information and expression in the future will entail a new element of military aid. Training will include technical assistance and infrastructural support in lieu of tanks and tear gas—though the latter will probably remain part of the arrangement. What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first. Indeed, traditional defense-industry leaders like Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are already working with the U.S. government to develop cyber-capacity. Weapons manufacturers, airplane builders and other parts of the military-industrial complex might not lessen—conventional militaries will always require guns, tanks and helicopters—but big military operations, already heavily privatized, will carve out space in their budgets for technical assistance.
