The open, globally affiliated Internet is facing increasing fragmentation, which leads to concerns about the emergence of a “splinter”.
This week, Meta, the parent company, was handed over to Facebook, a record of EUR 1.2 billion (£ 1 billion) for user data transfers from the EU to the United States. It was introduced by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which regulates META over the EU, for a violation of the Block’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
However, asked The custodian‘S Technology Editor, Alex Hern, means EU’s “growing online muscle” “means the long -awaited arrival of real integrity online” or is it another step towards “the creation of a” splinter “when international boundaries begin to make their presence known online as well as of? “
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What do we mean by the splinter?
In 2000, US President Bill Clinton gave a speech that expressed optimism about the transformative effect that the Internet could have on authoritarian states like China.
He told the audience in Washington that although it was not a “question” that the Chinese government was already trying to beat down on the Internet-invented for two decades earlier-where attempts to do it “in the same way as trying to nail Jell-O to The wall ”.
Just a year later, researcher Clayton Wayne Clews, then head of technology studies at the Cato Institute, coined a libertarian thought tank, the term “splinter”. “Despite its wild western reputation,” Clewes wrote in an editorial in 2001 for Forbes“Internet has no lack of regulation.”
Went the effects that increasing government regulation could have on the Internet, required Clews to create “parallel internets” that would go as autonomous online worlds and ask: “What about more internets, no more rules?”
The term it is used today has “come to denote all ways the Internet is fragmentation” said Sydney Morning Herald“But the primary danger of Clew’s predicted – regulation of governments – is still the most associated with the idea of a splinter.”
Is internet fragmentation?
The Internet has long been imagined as a “Global Online Allmen” said The economist In an article 2016, but it “becomes a maze of national or regional and often contradictory rules”.
Early activists and thinkers from digital rights, for example John Perry BarlowHoped that the Internet would remain a place for freedom from the borders of the nation states, but as the Internet has become “increasingly important for the modern world”, governments have tried “to regain lost territory online,” the economist said.
The physical infrastructure that supports “cloud calculation”, which is required to support many internet services, is anchored in specific sovereign territories, which allows governments to implement national laws and regulations.
This has led to what Think-Tank Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network has called a “Legal Arm’s race”, and since 2012 it has documented thousands of cases of jurisdiction problems online created by governments and courts.
Is the splinter already already?
China is often held as a prominent example of an early type of “splinter”. In an approach called the large firewall, “keeps the Chinese government” all major Western websites prohibited or censored, “says Culture Magazine SwallowAnd is known for having “a local option for each major app and website”.
Russia has “tried to mimic China’s attitude for over a decade”, said Fortunethrough the creation of what is called “runet”. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine attracted “greater attention to Runet” after the redirection of existing Ukrainian network connections through Russia in occupied areas.
But “Splinternets” is beyond China and Russia’s boundaries. In an article in 2015 for AtlanticAuthor Jillian C. York noted how place can determine what people can see on the internet.
In 2014, Twitter agreed to block porn actor Belle Knox photos in Pakistan due to a legal request from the country’s telecommunications authority. Twitter’s policy, introduced in 2012, allowed the content to be held, instead of completely removed, to comply with the government rules.
The policy meant that “a” view “of the platform from one country differs from the view from another,” York wrote. “In other words, a Pakistani Twitter users are provided a sanitized version of Twitter, while an American has access to – as far as we know – what content they want.”
She added: “Corporate decisions on controversial speech, such as this, too often results in the creation of an” iron curtain “of sorting and shares the seemingly boundless internet.”
Is the splinter a threat to civil liberties?
These problems are not only limited to authoritarian states, some authors have proposed.
In fact, the social media app TikTok is being banned from government units by several governments all over the world, including the United States and the United Kingdom, with discussions about a complete ban that gains momentum in many countries.
By “normalizing the idea that some technical pieces that have seen as acceptable for several years now simply not allowed to be used by politicians, even without evidence, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union have started the first accidents with a serious conflict,” Chris wrote Stokel-Walker for The new statesmanadds that “it cannot be a coincidence that weeks after Western democracies, TikTok prohibited official appliances, Russia said that its president’s administrative personnel must stop using iPhones by April 1.”
“The splinter happens,” wrote Stokel-Walker, “but on devices and through apps, rather than large infrastructure.”
It may be wise for those in the West to “release in a global-internet-tube dream,” Mike Elgan wrote for Computer worldNot least because there are “a couple (of) billions of people – at least – who do not have access to something similar to the global Internet” today.
“Instead, embrace the harsh reality” that there are already “many internets,” wrote Elgan, “and access to these senses and markets will take a lot of work”.
