The Fourth Internet: The Beijing Paternal Internet

This chapter describes the Beijing Paternal Internet. The ideal consists of respect for public values. The exemplar is China, whose Confucian heritage values hierarchy and social stability. China’s Communist Party asserts legitimacy via its claimed technocratic efficiency, and aims to restore China’s position as a regional and global superpower; it is playing more of a role in global Internet governance. Much of the Chinese Internet is run by private-sector giants like Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, but their activities have to align with government policy. The rule of law is weak, surveillance and censorship ubiquitous, and data-protection laws keep data about Chinese citizens available for government use. Citizens cooperate in monitoring, for example with the social credit system. The Belt and Road Initiative, a global technology infrastructure strategy, helps export Chinese ideas, including surveillance and security technology. Many governments other than China’s have paternal intentions for the Internet.

The Second Internet: The Brussels Bourgeois Internet

This chapter describes the Brussels Bourgeois Internet. The ideal consists of positive, managed liberty where rights of others are respected, as in the bourgeois public space, where liberty follows only when rights are secured. The exemplar of this approach is the European Union, which uses administrative means, soft law, and regulation to project its vision across the Internet. Privacy and data protection have become the most emblematic struggles. Under the Data Protection Directive of 1995, the European Union developed data-protection law and numerous privacy rights, including a right to be forgotten, won in a case against Google Spain in 2014, the arguments about which are dissected. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) followed in 2018, amplifying this approach. GDPR is having the effect of enforcing European data-protection law on international players (the ‘Brussels effect’), while the European Union over the years has developed unmatched expertise in data-protection law.

Policy Question: When Should Personal Data Cross Borders?

This chapter examines the flow of data across borders, in order to support the digital economy. Governments are increasingly treating data as a national asset, which will give economic advantages to foreign companies, while compromising the privacy of citizens. India and other nations in the developing world are concerned that they will be reduced to providing data as raw material and will be forced to import high-value services from tech companies in the United States and China, rather than developing their own digital economies. Initiatives using World Trade Organization agreements to coordinate global trade in data, supported by China and the United States, are examined, but they have not persuaded sceptics, leading to accusations of neo-colonialism. India is leading the holdouts, which may influence the Internet’s future. The ideologies underlying the Four Internets are compared with respect to their views of flows of data.

The Moscow Spoiler Model

The hacking ethic and organizations such as Pirate Parties and Anonymous support the use of technical skill to bypass security and censorship. The Russian government has weaponized this ethic to use the Internet to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories, and to undermine trust in epistemological authority globally. This leads us to call this the Moscow Spoiler model, although many other countries, political actors, and non-state actors also use the tactic. Quasi-state agencies in Russia such as the Internet Research Agency and gangs such as the Night Wolves automate misinformation, while activists like WikiLeaks have been used in kompromat operations to reveal true but confidential information alongside misinformation. The Moscow Spoiler is not a vision for the Internet, but parasitical on a functioning Internet. The chapter also reviews progress and problems in the development and application of fact checkers.

The Unity of Freedom

The final chapter summarizes the ideas of Four Internets. The Internet needs to remain connected, while its governance should allow different ideologies to flourish simultaneously, without imposing their view on the rest. Governance should pursue common interests while respecting cultural diversity. The prominent role of the United States remains an issue, although it has historically been a good steward of the infrastructure, and probably better than any alternative, including the multilateral structures promoted by nations like China and Russia. Governance is currently multistakeholder and ad hoc, but informal, emergent arrangements are probably better and more flexible than something neater and designed. Innovation and network effects need to be fostered, but policymakers will, on occasion, have to intervene against (perceived) negative externalities. New Internets will emerge over time; a COVID-19 Internet is imagined and described, for example. New technologies, such as quantum computing, will create new stresses, requiring a constant focus on resilience.

Social Machines

People use familiar networked technologies for coordinating social activities, from games to problem-solving. Such sociotechnical networks have been called social machines, and can be found in healthcare and well-being, crime prevention, transport, citizen science, and in particular during emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The role of platform(s) as host(s) is key as to how, and how privately, the social machine operates. Social machines can be monetized on the DC Commercial Internet, and monitored on the Beijing Paternal Internet. One means of democratizing the platform is the project to re-decentralize the Internet and Web, to break down the walls of walled gardens and restore decentralization. One such idea, Solid, is described in detail, where people take charge of their personal data, storing it as linked data to increase its utility, but keeping it in personal online datastores (pods) under their control.

India, the ‘Swing State’

If India’s population and Internet penetration grow at current rates, it will make a large contribution to the growth of the Internet. It has a world-class technology establishment. The chapter considers several possible policy directions. Openness is looked at through experiments in Andhra Pradesh to provide digital government. The attempt by Jio Platforms to provide integrated services for mobile users exemplifies the Commercial Internet. The influence of the Modi government’s Hindutva ideology is considered in a discussion of paternalism, together with the Aadhaar ID platform, and the Indian Data Protection Bill. There is a lot of misinformation and conspiracy theory in India, but it has not created a spoiler model to export misinformation to other countries. Finally, the export of ID technology using open source software and open standards is considered as a potential future Indian influence on the global Internet.

Smart Cities and the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is created by giving Internet connections to objects embedded in the environment, including wearable items. When IoT devices are connected and coordinated in an urban environment, smart cities are created, which can allow control of the environment, for example to improve carbon emissions or traffic flow. Instrumentation of the environment creates problems of consent, privacy, security, safety, and trust. The status of the IoT with respect to Internet ideology is discussed. The Silicon Valley Open Internet supports citizen-centric development, but may lack coordination at scale. The DC Commercial Internet creates great power for platforms. The Brussels Bourgeois Internet values rights and privacy, which may suppress innovation. In China, India, and elsewhere, smart cities are seen as key to developing a paternal social vision under digital modernity. Given its key role in the IoT, this is where America’s battle against Huawei may be most consequential.

Openness and Its Discontents

Although openness has many good arguments for it, it has led to a string of hard cases, including data protection and privacy, copyright, censorship, the externalities of social networks, and net neutrality. Openness brings three problematic effects: it is hard to keep out bad actors without centralized gatekeeping; openness does not ensure representativeness or diversity; collective action problems, such as free-riding, can occur. Some technologies enable the efficiencies of openness to be reproduced in systems that are not open, and governments have a number of levers they can pull to restrict Internet freedoms. Some governments even dream of total sovereignty over the Internet. There are various specific complaints about openness, including the need to treat different media differently, the problems of bad faith at scale, a large threat surface, and bias.

Policy Question: How Can Quality Be Ensured in an Open System Like Wikipedia?

This chapter examines the policy question of how to assure quality in an open system, using the crowdsourced online encyclopaedia Wikipedia as a case study. The history of Wikipedia’s development out of another online encyclopaedia, Nupedia, is sketched, with a description of how wiki technology allowed collaborative authoring. Wikipedia compares favourably with expert-written reference books, and has helped populate the Linked Data Web via DBpedia. However, to produce good content, and minimize hoaxes and trolling controversies such as the GamerGate affair, it needs a hierarchical meritocratic management system. This has resulting in tensions, particularly along gender lines, and relatively small numbers of women participate. However, the system has if anything become more hierarchical during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it has worked hard to eliminate misinformation.