Why Britain is being forced to pick sides in a global battle for control of the web – Telegraph.co.uk

Trump himself has also set the tone: he is a lifelong Sinosceptic with a zero-sum view of international relations, elected on a platform of overturning his predecessor's comfortable free-trade consensus and now facing an uphill climb for re-election.

But Prof Weber argues that a Democrat president might actually be doing the same. Rather than a disruptive leader demolishing American globalism, he sees a rational response to the worldwide decay of the trust that enabled the "free and open internet" which was "always a mythology".

For years, he says, many countries did try to lower the boundaries between the mutually-compatible networks that made up the internet. Then the Edward Snowden surveillance revelations of 2013 put foreign governments on notice that the "free and open internet" was "mainly a US intelligence collection site".

American talk of the global internet as a tool for "revolution" also hastened its end. "Dictatorships of the third world really learned from that, and they learned to be nervous of the internet," says Prof O'Hara, co-author of the "four internets" paper.

At one point the US government even covertly funded an underground social network in Cuba, nicknamed "Cuban Twitter". The hope was to incite unrest by unleashing the "wild colt" of online dissent, much as then secretary of state Hillary Clinton had hailed Twitter's role in the Arab Spring. The project was shut down in 2012.

Meanwhile, the US itself became a target of government hackers. Russia's election interference in 2016 showed Americans that the internet could harm them too as did China's increasingly aggressive campaign of cyber-espionage, part of a lurch back towards authoritarianism under President Xi Jinping.

The internet, it turned out, was not a new world or better but simply a new "layer" of the dirty old one, just as capable of becoming a battlefield.

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Why Britain is being forced to pick sides in a global battle for control of the web - Telegraph.co.uk