A child and an adult are both inside a glass box. The adult is starting deliberately at the child as the glass fades to black. 
 
Rather discomforting, right?
 
This is the image the UK government wants to be engraved into the minds of every British citizen. According to an article published by the Rolling Stone magazine, the government plans to launch a campaign with the aim to “mobilize public opinion against Facebook’s decision to encrypt its Messenger app”. And, to make sure it captures the public’s opinion, the government is deploying tactics of sensationalism, exaggeration and emotion.
 
This scaremongering is not a first for the UK government, which has been fighting against encryption for quite some time. Back in 2015, former Prime Minister David Cameron, pledged to ban online messaging applications that offer end-to-encryption. Although the ban never happened, since then, the UK has been on a steady course to ensure the government and law enforcement have access to encrypted communications. And, the Online Safety Bill, a legislation aiming to address content moderation practices and platform responsibility, appears to be encryption’s death sentence.
 
One cannot help but wonder why the UK is so insistent to break encryption. Is it about power; is it about control? What is certain is that by intercepting encrypted communication, the UK government will have a front seat at the most intrinsic, intimate and personal conversations of its citizens. Imagine having knowledge of how your citizens say when they think they are alone, then imagine controlling it, and then imagine the possibilities of manipulation and abuse. I think you can get the picture of how expansive the powers of a government can suddenly become. This is surveillance at its most basic level and, in moving in this direction, the UK will soon be living Orwell’s 1984 nightmare. And, if this comparison is not compelling enough, then think that by doing this, the UK will be joining the company of countries like China in terms of user surveillance. 
 
The UK government’s argument is that encryption is an obstacle to ensuring the safety of children. Law enforcement agencies and charities have rallied behind this argument, suggesting that encryption hides millions of reports of child abuse and that end-to-end encrypted communication services are the main vessels for child grooming, child exploitation, sex trafficking and other child-related crimes. These claims create awe and one would hope that they are supported by strong, hard evidence; unfortunately, this is not the case. Although we all suspect that at some level encrypted communication services are used for illegal acts, but so is every technology. It is the nature of humans to use any technology for good and bad. And, the worrying part of the UK’s approach is that it appears disinterested or unwilling to take into consideration the good things that encryption brings.
 
Privacy, security, trust – these are things that encryption achieves effortlessly. Encryption allows an LGBTQI kid to communicate without fear of bullying or, in many cases, persecution; it ensures that a domestic abuser is able to reach out for support and seek help; it helps activists and whistleblowers to come forward with information that holds governments and businesses accountable, which is the basis of every democracy; it helps all of us to exercise our freedoms and rights without the fear of someone snooping around. Of course, the safety of children is very important, but so is the safety of everyone else. And, without evidence to support that the ‘problem’ will be fixed by just banning encryption, is it really worth it?
 
The UK government insists it is and for this purpose it has hired M&C Saatchi, involved in a controversial campaign during Brexit, to carry out its campaign. According to reports, the campaign will cost UK tax payers half a million pounds and, according to Jim Killock, Executive Director at the Open Rights Group, it is a “distraction tactic” seeking to manipulate the British public opinion. 
 
However, the truth about encryption is unequivocal: it is a necessary foundation for the internet and for societies. In many ways, encryption is the technical foundation for the trust on the Internet – it promotes freedom of expression, privacy, commerce, user trust, while helping to protect data from bad actors. Regulating encryption in order to hinder criminals communicating confidentially runs the significant risk of making it impossible for law-abiding citizens to protect their data. The main objective of security is to foster confidence in the internet and ensure its economic growth. 
 
In this regard, it becomes a valid question what such a ban will mean for the UK’s economic growth and innovation. In Australia, the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Assistance and Access Act (TOLA) 2018, which mandated tech companies to break encrypted traffic so law enforcement could get a peek at the online communication of Australians, is said to have resulted “in significant economic harm for the Australian economy and produce negative spillovers that will amplify that harm globally”.” There is really no reason why things will be different for the UK. 
 
It is important to note that, any technique used to mandate a communications’ provider to undermine encryption or provide false trust arrangements introduces a systemic weakness, which then becomes difficult to rectify. The fact of the matter is that once trust in the Internet is broken, it becomes very difficult to restore it. And, trust is what ultimately drives the use, consumption and creativity in the Internet. 
 
Ten years ago this week, the United States Congress proposed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which drew a great deal of criticism about its impact on the internet and human rights. Stakeholders from around the world, civil society, the technical community, businesses and academia, all joined forces against a piece of legislation that would undermine our trust to the internet and our ability to express ourselves without fear. What the UK proposes to do with encryption is no different; it will change the relationship users have with the internet for the worse. 
 
The UK may want to keep children safe, but by banning encryption, it will end up making everyone, including children, unsafe and vulnerable, while turning the UK into one of the most inhospitable internet and innovation hubs in the world. It is time for all of us to rejoice and fight for what is right: our right to a secure and private internet experience. 

The internet, as it exists today, is an artifact of a time in which global cooperation seemed reasonable, even inevitable. While the process of building the internet required difficult trade-offs—trading security for simplicity, for example—as a world we produced a system that, more or less, works together. 

But the free flow of information online is now under threat by growing fragmentation across national borders. This internet fragmentation is both as a driver and a reflection of growing fragmentation in the world order. The effort by the U.S. government to ban the Chinese viral video app TikTok is a reflection of this reality: a response by the U.S. government to growing Chinese influence manifested online, resulting in a splintering global internet. Internet policy and international affairs move together.

Throughout the internet’s history, its major stakeholders have made trade-offs around how different social and technical systems interoperate. Security is one such trade-off. Contrary to popular belief, security was indeed considered in the internet’s original design; however, deploying a decentralized, open architecture was difficult to balance against security requirements. Erring on the side of creating interoperable building blocks, a trade-off emerged: make simple, fundamental elements and address security issues as they emerged. The system’s interconnectedness served as a shared incentive, and the internet as we knew it grew—though not without bumps along the road—to become global.

But the global internet is now under existential threat from fragmentation. And the problem with fragmentation is that it puts global cooperation at risk, as differences in the internet across borders are predictive of international trade and military relations, according to research conducted as part of the University of California, Berkeley Daylight Security Research Lab.

Such findings should recast discussions about internet fragmentation. Internet fragmentation does not concern narrowly the “free” movement of information (an ideal that has never been fully accomplished), nor does it merely challenge the internet’s “distributed” design, another ideal whose implementation has only ever been partial. Rather, a fragmenting internet is representative of and has the possibility of contributing to a fragmenting world order.

Such analysis of a fragmented internet looks at different layers of the internet “stack”—the building blocks that cobbled together comprise the internet—to quantify, for example, how similar France’s internet is to that of Germany, Canada, or Thailand. Using these country-to-country comparisons, we produce a network graph, with each country related to every other in a web of national internets that are, more or less, interoperable with one another. The graph reveals clusters that correlate with everything from military alliances to trade agreements—even to political principles such as freedom of speech. For example, content blocking patterns in European Union countries are significantly more similar to one another than they are to non-EU countries. The same is true of NATO countries.

Notably, these findings do not indicate that blocking policies cause, for example, freedom of speech to decline. Nor that restrictions on free speech cause a country to block websites. Rather, they indicate that website blocking patterns—the types of websites a country blocks—reveal information about a country’s position on the global stage.​















China’s blocking patterns are relatively unique, though they share similarities with Hong Kong and Lichtenstein.In one sense, the strength of that relationship is unsurprising. The internet is, and has always been, both a product and a driver of political realities on the ground. From the role it played during the Arab Spring in 2012 to the way it has been used as a tool to interfere with the U.S. elections in 2016, the internet is a powerful tool for driving political change.

Internet fragmentation has always existed, but the fact that the internet has evolved the way it has, becoming global, is evidence that interoperability is more than just aspirational. World-scale collaboration, while difficult, is possible. It is as possible now as it was in the late 20th century.

Interoperability opens doors to participation and invites collaboration. To this end, the internet, and the threats to its operation as a global system, are a continuous invitation to work together. Not to agree, per se, but to agree to continue talking. To continue speaking the same proverbial language. Interoperability is not an end in itself. It is a means toward achieving shared goals. As cross-border goals emerge, from containing COVID-19 to battling climate change, interoperable ways of observing and discussing the world become more crucial.

Moving forward, policymakers must safeguard the fundamental interoperability of the global internet. Rules and legislation should prevent fragmentation, enshrining the principles of a decentralized network made from open, interoperable components. As our research shows, the rewards for doing so come in trade, military alliance and social freedoms.

To get to these regulations, policymakers must understand the internet’s ecosystem. Climate change provides an illustrative example: Cooperation is necessary, but action is impossible without understanding.

Our ongoing research serves a part—a small part—in making the interoperable internet more understandable, and immediately relevant, to policy.

Dr. Nick Merrill directs the Daylight Lab at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. His lab produces tools for understanding and addressing critical security issues.
Dr. Konstantinos Komaitis is the senior director for Policy Strategy and Development at the Internet Society.

Note: this post was originally posted at: https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/the-consequences-of-a-fragmenting-less-global-internet/​ 

​

On January 28, the UK government was set to announce whether it would allow Huawei, the Chinese information and communication technologies provider, to develop its 5G infrastructure. Given Brexit and its need to form new alliances, the decision was marked as a significant moment for the UK’s trade future. Leading up to the day of the decision, the UK was subjected to a significant amount of pressure from the United States government to reject any deal with Huawei. (Similar pressure was exercised towards any other US ally considering to use Huawei’s 5G infrastructure). In a tweet sent by US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, the day before the decision was due, he made the claim that Britain’s decision would effectively be one of sovereignty.
 
We can debate the merits of this claim, but the thing that I want to focus on is the often-use of the word ‘sovereignty’ in conjunction to the Internet and technology. It is interesting to observe how in almost every single discussion about the role governments should have in the Internet, the term ‘sovereignty’ pops up. Terms like “digital sovereignty”, “technological sovereignty” or “Internet sovereignty” have become commonplace. 
 
But, does sovereignty help advance the Internet governance conversations?
 
The answer is an emphatic ‘no’; sovereignty adds an extra layer of complexity and only pushes states further apart while, simultaneously, it undermines and fragments the Internet. Sovereignty and the Internet are – prima facie – two irreconcilable concepts.
 
Born out of the effort to connect networks with one another, the Internet was originally designed to not recognize any geographical boundaries. Its design embodies a true decentralized structure in the sense that it is both architecturally decentralized – it runs on multiple computers – as well as politically– no central authority has power over those networks. This decentralized nature has further allowed the various autonomous networks to interconnect with one another irrespective of where in the world they are located. In fact, since its inception, one of the Internet’s distinguishable characteristics has been its global reach: “any endpoint of the Internet can address any other endpoint, and the information received at one endpoint is as intended by the sender, wherever the receiver connects to the Internet. Implicit in this is the requirement of global, managed addressing and naming services”. 
 
Sovereignty, on the other hand, is all about strict geographical boundaries. It refers to the legal autonomy of the state to act independently and without constraints within its own territory. Under its Rousseaunian tradition it reflects the power of the state emerging from its people and for the people.  
 
In the context of geopolitical disputes for transnational communication technologies, sovereignty is currently seen as the construction of a governance system with the ability to coordinate and manage exchanges that may or, may not, address primarily issues of privacy/data protection and security. In this context, its application is one of scale. Historically, countries always sought to impose some sort of domestic legislation to the Internet, but, at the same time, most of them equally understood and respected the need for network autonomy and integrity. Over the past few years, however, there has been a significant shift in this thinking, with an increasing number of countries now actively seeking to centralize control over the Internet. For any country interested in the governance of the Internet, the claim to sovereignty is a claim to power. 
 
Such a Foucauldian approach considers sovereign power as a constant negotiation about the validity of claims of knowledge and truth, which dictates the power dynamics within a system. In this context, we can observe countries, like Russia and China, racing to codify their own notions of sovereignty in international law, much in the same way, the West was integrating its ideas of “universal values” when the Internet first emerged and for the best part of the its commercial history. 
 
Three distinguishable forms of “Internet sovereignty” have emerged thus far. 
 
The first one is China’s vision of sovereignty which is predominantly attached to notions of national security and securitization. (Russia is also part of this thinking, but its vision and technology implementation is not nearly as advanced as China’s.) China’s Internet sovereignty is all about the right of national governments to supervise, regulate and censor all electronic content that passes through its borders – what Bill Bishop has referred to as the “invisible birdcage”. In China, “Internet sovereignty” first appeared in a 2010 White Paper, which indicated that “within Chinese territory the Internet is under the jurisdiction of Chinese sovereignty. […] To build, utilize and administer the Internet well is an issue that concerns national economic prosperity and development, state security and social harmony, state sovereignty and dignity, and the basic interests of the people”. Since then and through a series of laws focusing primarily on cybersecurity, China has increasingly placed chokepoints on its Internet infrastructure, requiring network operators to store data within China and allowing Chinese authorities to conduct spot-checks on the network operations of any company operating out of China. On December 1st, 2019, China rolled out its Cybersecurity Multi-level Protection Scheme (MLPS 2.0), aiming to create a system that is able to monitor every activity in China: Internet, mobile, WeChat type social networks, cloud systems, national and international email – everything. The framework’s goal is not to empower users or even allow companies to make money; it is an attempt to centralize control over key network operations to the Chinese government. With this strategy China does not seek to close itself out of the global Internet but, instead, to strengthen global network integration.
 
For Europe, sovereignty means independence from the dominant US technology companies. Europe started flirting with “digital sovereignty” as a response to the Snowden revelations in 2013. A 2014 research paper by the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) and New America’s Open Technology Institute identified around 12 European countries using the term or considering practical policy solutions to its end. These policies ranged from the construction of new undersea cables to stronger data protection rules; they detailed different layers of extreme with some going as far as to suggest forced data localization and routing rules. Although most of these proposals never materialized, Europe has integrated sovereignty in its recent digital strategy. Last year, Ursula Von Der Leyen, Europe’s chief Commissioner stated that “it is not too late to achieve technological sovereignty in some critical areas.” Similarly, her number two and the EU’s competition czarina, Commissioner Margrethe Vestager argued that digital sovereignty can be achieved through “the development of key value chains and technologies that are of strategic importance for Europe” and which should be “open, truly European, innovative and lead to widespread knowledge dissemination”. 
 
And, then there is the case of India. India presents a big oxymoron being both the largest democracy in the world and the world leader in deploying Internet shutdowns as a political tool to assert its sovereignty. Since August 2019, India has sanctioned the longest Internet shutdown ever to occur in a democracy, in the disputed Kashmir region. Discretionary and vague legal rules regarding the control the government can exercise over India’s Internet service providers has further enabled the government to restrict or limit access on regional and district levels. But, it is its data localization laws that further indicate India’s direction towards a more sovereignty-based Internet. A series of recent laws require different forms of data, from governmental to heath and financial to be stored in India. Additionally, India’s data protection legislation lays out the conditions under which “critical” and “sensitive” data are to be stored locally; this includes, financial, health and biometric information.  An official document by the Committee of Experts on data protection acknowledged that although “laws facilitating cross-border data flows […] greatly foster research, technology development and economic growth”, critical personal data should be processed only in India with no cross-border transfer allowed. 
 
So, what does this all mean and why should we care? 
 
For the state, to view the Internet as nothing more than an extension of its sovereignty right should not come as a surprise.  The key role of states is to make more of life ‘legible’ as James Scott has convincingly argued – this means to better record and measure human affairs in an effort to make them easier to manage. However, the drive for ‘legible’ or readable structures that can be easily understood and regulated often comes with a fatal flaw; in the top-down drive to simplify and formalize our understanding of complex systems, we sometimes disregard the local and practical knowledge critical to managing the complexity. To this end, our expectations that the state should – or would for that matter – see the Internet in a different fashion must be moderated. With this in mind, what is the impact sovereignty has on the current state of play? 
 
The first point of this consideration is the pressure sovereignty places on the Internet. Although as we said previously, it should be expected that governments apply rules of sovereignty in all aspects of international relations, including the Internet, the stricter the application of those rules, the more danger there is for the Internet to splinter and fragment. And, by this we don’t mean that the global Internet will cease to exist; rather, it will not be neither desirable nor beneficial for people and networks to participate in the global Internet. Its resilience, which depends on the very fact that networks are diversely spread around the world, will diminish and with it any need for interoperation. 
 
The other problem is how sovereignty contributes to state actors not being willing to collaborate. States are already split in their views of the Internet – a split that grows bigger. A UN resolution by Russia in the last days of 2019 on cybercrime, demonstrated the increasing division amongst the views of states. The resolution, which was opposed by the US and Europe but backed by China, passed 79 to 60, with 33 abstentions. And, although we should not be sounding the alarm bells yet, still this resolution indicates a clear move towards a more sovereign based approach for the Internet, which does not create any conditions for collaboration. In fact, sovereignty is the antithesis to collaboration and, this constitutes a problem. The Internet’s past is based on collaboration. Its future also depends on it. 
 
Why is all this important? Because, whichever nation manages to crack the sovereignty code, will also determine the Internet we will end up using. Will it be an open and global space based on interoperation and mutual agreement? Or, will it be a closed and fragmented model based on geographical boundaries and cultural relativism. 

By now, are all exposed to the narrative of how the Internet is no longer a safe place. It is full of bots, misinformation, abuse and violence; it is a space that has been overtaken by terrorists and extremists. The Internet is weaponized to influence elections, undermine democracies and instill fear in its users. That’s the story we are told.
 
No one can deny the swift change that is taking place in global politics. The “brave new world’ that has emerged is, currently, based on isolation and fear. We have officially entered the politics of fear. 
 
How true is this though? How real is fear in the Internet?
 
Arguably, fear is as old as life. It is deeply part of all living organisms that have survived extinction through billions of years of evolution. Its roots go deep in our biological and psychological existence, and it is one of the most intimate feelings we get to experience. Demagogues have always used fear as a means to intimidate their subordinates or enemies, while shepherding the tribe by the leaders. Fear is a very strong tool that can blur humans’ logic and change their behavior. 
 
Fear has become part of the Internet experience. Every week there is another data breach, another privacy violation, child abusive content proliferates, questionable forums like 8chan are inreasing and people are constantly bullied for expressing – or not expressing – their opinions. The Internet is a dark place. That’s the only story we get to hear. That’s the story world leaders – democratic and not – tell to justify their attempts to control the Internet and turn it into a centralized and restricted space. This is the global trend. But, is it?
 
The past ten days I have been fortunate to spend some time in New Zealand. What a pleasant surprise it has been. I left the European way of Interneting, a way that is based on distrust, individualism and fear, only to be exposed to the Kiwi way, which is based on trust, collaboration and hope. I, myself, had lost hope that such a way still exists. 
 
March 15, 2019 is the date New Zealanders  - and the rest of the world - will never forget. A gunman, carrying two semi-automatic weapons, two shotguns and a lever-action firearm opened fire indiscriminately at two mosques in Christchurch during Friday prayer. The first attack was livestreamed on Facebook. It was viewed 200 times during its live broadcast and 4000 times in total before it was removed. According to Facebook, the company was notified about the livestream 12 minutes after the video had ended. Over the 24 hours following the attack, individuals attempted to re-upload the video 1.5 million times. 
 
New Zealand had a choice to make: succumb to fear or hang on to hope. And, it chose the latter. Post-Christchurch, the government of New Zealand did not order a shutdown of Internet or its services; it did not rush through legislation that sought to regulate the way companies and users interact in the Internet. Its government did not engage in fear mongering. Instead, led by its Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand turned to the international community asking for collaboration to address what she considered to be a global issue -- how to deal with extremist and violent content online (what would become the “Christchurch call”). In praising this collaborative approach during my panel intervention at NetHui, New Zealand’s version of an Internet governance dialogue, I was told: “this is the Kiwi way of doing things”. Well, the Kiwi way, is also the Internet way. Bringing people together, to collaborate to solve “wicked problems” and address complex questions has been the “Internet way” all along. Without necessarily realizing it, New Zealand was upholding one of the Internet’s most fundamental properties. 
 
During her speech at NetHui, the Prime Minister recognized the challenges the Internet is facing and the slow progress post-Christchurch. Yet again, this did not make her move into panic mode. Instead, she reaffirmed and recommitted to an open, secure and free Internet. She mentioned that she still believes in the ability of the Internet to bring positive change; to be the space of expression and creativity; to be the engine of unstoppable innovation. She said she wanted to do the right thing. 
 
Let's not miss the significance of this. Without intending, New Zealand has become the example of how we must all approach the challenges we face in the Internet; it has become the Internet's champion. Sure, there are still things that the Kiwis need to learn about the Internet and understand better the way it works. Sure the “Christchurch call” process has its own deficiencies and issues. But, ultimately, it is all about New Zealand’s willingness not to close, shut down, centralize or try to control the Internet that they must be commended. 
 
The ‘kiwi way’ of Interneting must not go unnoticed. It must become a lesson for the rest of the world leaders.