Geopolitics & A Divided Internet
Could we end up with locked down internets around the world? What might the implications be?
Lucy kept hitting the refresh button on her browser in her London flat late at night. That afternoon she’d received the token giving her access the Vietnam online public library. She needed it for her thesis research, but since Vietnam was in the AsiaNet zone, she required special permission. Her every move would be watched by an AI agent assigned to her. It would would determine what she could access.
Hamoud too was in a similar situation, but he was in Egypt based in the ArabNet zone and wanted access into the EuroNet zone for his research and to talk with his sister who’d moved to France for her studies. He’d had to provide his identity credentials, detail the nature of his request and await a token to grant access for a few hours to select websites and archives.
Sounds a bit odd given that we can zip about the internet today, now synonymous with the World Wide Web, and access so much, so fast. But as I outlined in a previous article on the geopolitics of data, maybe this isn’t so far-fetched? What might a “splinternet” look like? What are the implications.
