‘Cybersovereignty’ Splits the Once World Wide Web
This is going to be the big story of the next decade and it&#x27;s being largely ignored right now because it&#x27;s mainly happening around the margins in some developing countries right now.<p>China and the US are presenting two very different visions of the web and I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s as simple as presenting a narrative of West right, East wrong. For non-aligned countries, I think there are compelling arguments on both sides in ways that simply aren&#x27;t relevant for the US.<p>It&#x27;s interesting to contrast this with the immigration control&#x2F;border security debate where the US has placed itself very far onto the side of &quot;sovereignty&quot; (that is, the state should have significant and <i>overriding</i> power over practical, implementational elements of who &amp; what crosses US borders). It&#x27;s hard then, for any country not steeped in an existing Western liberal tradition, to look at the West&#x27;s hardline stance on border sovereignty and not see how the equivalent cannot be prioritized for cyber sovereignty should the state so choose.<p>Look at Sri Lanka for example, after the bombings, the Sri Lankan government had a single, binary choice: Shut down all social media or don&#x27;t shut down any social media. This is the equivalent of the government only being able to choose a normally functioning border or a total and complete shut down of the border because border control facilities are operated by foreign, uncontactable private entities. Governments are increasingly seeing how this is an untenable state of affairs and how much of their public policy is now being outsourced to American, private companies outside of their control.<p>Outside of China, nobody else really has the clout or scale to build a somewhat hermetically sealed internet but this is what gives China now the avenue to export their technologies and present a new vision of how governments can use cyberspace to achieve policy aims. I believe companies like WeChat are working on a suite of tools where they will be able to go to Governments and say &quot;look, we can provide you an install where any message going between two of your citizens will be stored exclusively inside of your country in a place Tencent does not have access to and we will provide you with the entire suite of Government management tools that we currently provide the Chinese Government on any message that crosses your border.&quot; After something like the Sri Lankan bombing, Sri Lankan censors, hired by the Sri Lankan government could use Chinese made tools to provide a much more surgical shaping of the conversation.<p>This is the strategy credit China is willing to wield (Chinese companies have much more experience building Government management tools) and it&#x27;s up to Western companies to decide whether they want to stick to their principles or be forced down the same path (any guesses which they will pick?).<p>For example, there are four key sectors I believe are obviously going to fall under strong government purview in the coming decade: Messaging, Publishing, E-Commerce &amp; Transportation.<p>Imagine if a government told Uber that they have to start recording the real IDs of every rider and report trip request info in real time to a Government API where the Govt can veto the ride (so as to detect when protests&#x2F;riots are about to start and choke off transportation to the site). If the condition is, Uber not complying means the Govt means the country kicks Uber out and replaces it with Didi, is Uber really not going to cave? Even if Uber does comply, maybe they still give the contract to Didi because Didi has a larger pool of data in their system and can provide better ML tools to the government on when public disturbances are going to happen.<p>This is not to say that all governments will take all the steps, but that it&#x27;s going to be increasingly important that <i>any</i> government can take <i>any</i> of the steps and we&#x27;re going to increasingly move into a world where tech companies in key sectors will have to devote as much effort into building Government Management tools as they will, Community Management tools.<p>This is what the Cyber Sovereignty movement is all about.