The Cold War never truly ended. The USSR might be a thing of the past and there’s a Gucci location just off Tiananmen Square but friction between ideologically opposed global superpowers still defines international politics in the 21st century.
The US and China frequently butt heads and there’s almost no arena in which the two powers don’t wrestle – manufacturing, sporting achievements, philanthropy, even at the movies. China and America fight to export their goods, cultures and ways of thinking, and Australia often finds itself in the middle of the fray.
The Internet is another battleground. Chinese apps like TikTok, WeChat and DiDi are becoming rapidly more popular in Australia and around the world. The American companies that have traditionally monopolised digital services – say Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google – face ever-stiffer competition from their Chinese counterparts – Weibo, Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu… But the basic architecture of the Internet is essentially Western. But maybe not for long, if Beijing gets its way.
A recent article in The Australian examines how China is pushing to create a new standard for core network technology called New IP (Internet Protocol). It’s a savvy move: many agree that the current state of the Internet is poorly suited to our modern, highly interconnected world. The Internet as we know it is a loosely regulated Wild West, dominated by a few very powerful (American) companies.
China’s New IP would see our current, amorphous Internet divided up into highly regulated national internets in a system they’ve termed “cyber sovereignty”. New IP would also require networks to have tracking features and access denial features as standard, giving governments and state-run internet providers enormous control over what users could or couldn’t access as well as highly invasive in-built surveillance capabilities.
Let’s not be naive: China isn’t the only country that keeps a close eye on what its citizens see and do online. The NSA’s mass surveillance program is well-known and continues despite widespread domestic and international condemnation. Indeed, whilst it’s a largely innocuous example, Australia’s COVIDSafe app is a form of digital surveillance. We accept some invasion of our personal liberties in order to combat threats.
But there’s a big difference to willingly downloading an app to help track the spread of a dangerous disease, and the kind of restrictions and censorship China imposes on its people. The current Internet already leaves users vulnerable to invasions of privacy, but a top-down ‘Internet 2.0’ like China wants to impose on the world with such arbitrary powers handed to network owners would be even less private.
Experts are concerned that an Internet architecture that’s built around enabling state surveillance would be abused by other authoritarian regimes in order to further subjugate their citizens. The current Internet isn’t perfect but it doesn’t give bad actors such easy access to methods of control.
Additionally, controversial Chinese tech giant Huawei would be the one to build this new architecture. Huawei has already been banned from building Australia’s 5G network amongst security concerns. There’s a legitimate concern that state-owned firm Huawei would allow the Chinese government backdoor access into any network they help construct. So it wouldn’t only be your country spying on you, but China too.
Geoff Quattromani, tech expert and host of the podcast Technology Uncorked, explains that there’s a genuine need for Internet reform, but that needs to be balanced by privacy and free speech concerns.
“The real concern looking to be addressed here is how nations or the world govern the internet, if they should at all. But the fact [is] that almost like building new suburbs, we’re running out of postal addresses for websites to exist.”
“We need to expand our IP ranges, enable the Internet to grow and move it into a new era of internet protocol…”
“My expectation is the largest users of the free world’s internet (the “West”) will be the ones to design the next era, and we’ll move without noticing.”
Indeed, Europe’s coming up with its own alternative to New IP. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is developing what it calls Non-IP Networking (NIN), which in complete contrast to China’s New IP, revolves around further empowering users, as opposed to states / providers.
The takeaway from all this is that we need to be switched on and aware of our rights online. We make a willing bargain to give up some privacy in return for the services these big tech giants offer (I’d be completely screwed without Gmail, for example). But ultimately it should be us making that decision, not some government or network provider. Quattromani relates:
“While we’re all users of the services Google, Amazon, Facebook etc. offer, then we should align with their plans to grow the internet.”
“When it comes to what China intends to do, it’s [about] controlling the message, filtering and silencing the rest of the world.”
“Having been to China and lived within their virtual firewall, I can tell you now, it is better on this side of the fence where you aren’t arrested for speaking out or telling the truth.”