Is The Global Internet Disintegrating?

''The global internet is disintegrating," argues BBC Future, calling
Russia "one of a growing number of countries that has had enough of
the Western-built, Western-controlled internet backbone...aided as
much by advances in technology as by growing global misgivings about
whether the open internet was ever such a good idea to start with."

"The new methods raise the possibility not only of countries pulling
up their own drawbridges, but of alliances between like-minded
countries building on these architectures to establish a parallel
internet..."

It's DNS that Russia has been setting its sights on... The plan --
which was met with skepticism from much of the engineering community,
if not dismissed outright -- was to create a Russia-only copy of the
DNS servers (the internet's address book, currently headquartered in
California) so that citizens' traffic would be exclusively directed to
Russian sites, or Russian versions of external sites. It would send
Russian internet users to Yandex if they typed in Google, or the
social network VK instead of Facebook. To lay the groundwork for this,
Russia spent years enacting laws that force international companies to
store all Russian citizens' data inside the country -- leading some
companies such as LinkedIn to be blocked when they refused to
comply...

According to estimates from the International Institute for Strategic
Studies in London, China is now engaged in some 80 telecommunications
projects around the world -- from laying cables to building core
networks in other countries, contributing to a significant and growing
Chinese-owned global network... One possibility is a scenario where
enough countries join Russia and China to develop a similar
infrastructure to a point where they could sustain each other
economically without doing business with the rest of the world,
meaning they could shut themselves off the Western internet. Smaller
countries might prefer an internet built around a non-Western
standard, and an economic infrastructure built around China might be
the "third way" that allows countries to participate in a semi-global
economy while being able to control certain aspects of their
populations' internet experience.

Maria Farrell of the Open Rights Group (an internet freedom
organisation) tells BBC Future that "Nations like Zimbabwe and
Djibouti, and Uganda, they don't want to join an internet that's just
a gateway for Google and Facebook" to colonise their digital spaces.
And there's also fears about western espionage.

"Along with every other expert interviewed for this article, Farrell
reiterated how unwise it would be underestimate the ongoing
reverberations of the Snowden revelations..."'

-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/05/19/1652253

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
_______________________________________________
wlug mailing list | [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug