The splintering of the internet and how it may affect India |India Today Insight – India Today

Ever since US President Donald Trump announced he was going to ban TikTok unless an American company bought it out by the middle of September, tech experts have raised alarm over the dangers of this prospect. They say this could fragment the internet along spheres of national interests and give rise to multiple ecosystems of the internet. In other words, it could mark the beginning of an American version of the internet similar to the ecosystem that exists in China.

The US plan to implement a clean networkwhich would block Chinese companies from accessing app stores and cloud services, among other thingshas invited a strong backlash because the internet, as a subcultural project of the 70s that had de-linked itself from its strong military-industrial complex roots, was intended for everyone. Techies in Silicon Valley, as Scott Malcomson has explained in his book Splinternet, were given a free rein to work on personal computers and the internet to empower the individual and free people, as it were, from the oppression of the state, a sign of the times of the culture that thrived in the Bay area in the backdrop of the Vietnam war. Silicon Valley ethos gradually sat well with the notions of the internationalist principles that resembled American values. But as time passed, tech giants, led by commercial interests, swallowed up the internet. So much so that we associate the internet today with, say, a Google or an Amazon. Thats all the more true for us in India because we adopted the US tech model. Other countries, such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, bought into the Chinese model. But even in the 80s, when American superiority was a given, computer pioneers like Jon Postel thought long and hard about the future of internet governance because they knew it had to be protected from getting caught up in government rivalries.

In 1988, computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock chaired a National Research Council committee that submitted a report. The Kleinrock report suggested bringing in the US government as a funder of the internet project because, as the report argued, foreign competitors are busy at work with their own national research networks. Clearly, the US was wary that everyone would want some degree of control over cyberspace. Even though the internet appeared largely free from state interference, the 2013 Edward Snowden revelations told another story. The US government was allegedly using American companies to spy on citizens and enemies, whether they knew about it or not. The tech industry was taken aback by what seemed like an admission of the defeat of the global internet project. Their role as gatekeepers of the global project was downsized to, as Splinternet mentions, that of the unwitting agent of the intensely anxious security apparatus of one particular nation at a time.

Tech companies retaliated by encrypting and re-encrypting services even though the US government said they wanted special access to the internet on national security grounds. This debate has remained a flashpoint between tech companies and governments across the world. It is also currently playing out in India, where the government has asked WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, to trace the originators of fake messages. But WhatsApp has declined to do so and said that while it could provide law enforcement agencies with users meta data, it could not directly trace conversations between users since it would be a breach of their encryption policy. This debate began in 2018 after the Indian government proposed a series of new rules for social intermediaries, asking them to remove unlawful content, among other things. The norms are also related to Indias data protection bill, which is yet to be enacted into law.

Similarly, when Facebook acquired a 9.99 per cent stake in Reliance Jio platforms, the deal caused a surprise over the fact that Facebook and Reliance had differing views on two major internet policies: data localisation measures and encryption policies. Arindrajit Basu, a researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society, explains that big tech companies were typically against data localisation measures whereas Indian companies heavily favoured it. In its integrated annual report in 2018-19, Reliance mentioned that keeping a copy of citizens data in servers within the country would also spur investment in creating server and cloud capacity in India, incentivising research and developing and creating employment in line with the governments Make in India initiative. Building cloud capacitythey can never crash unlike physical servers that can come under attack quite easilyis becoming the next sphere of geostrategic competition as every country rallies to co-opt the benefits of services bound to come as a result of the roll-out of 5G. Facebook is aware of the precedent it can set if it does agree with the governments rules to keep citizens data within the countryit can again be held hostage to the whims of a government agency.

Besides, the Indian government has on several occasions shut down internet services in parts of the country, which has caught the eye of the international community. Internet shutdowns are common in authoritarian countries like China, but not in democracies. Kashmir, which has about 7 million people, has not had 4G internet for close to a year, though the Centre has announced it will start restoring 4G internet on a trial basis after August 15. Similarly, India is now part of a democratic coalition of countries, dubbed the D10 by the British government, which aims to find alternative suppliers of 5G to cut reliance on Chinas Huwaei. D10 includes all the G7 economies, along with India, Australia and South Korea.

Though India has deferred its 5G plans for a year owing to the Covid pandemic and has not announced whether itll block Huwaei and ZTE in the 5G rollout, sources in the government say India is deliberating on the 5-G plan. Several factors are being weighed, the sources said, to dictate the coming up of a Great Wall of India against these companies.

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The splintering of the internet and how it may affect India |India Today Insight - India Today