As governments across the world have awoken to the immensely disruptive power of the internet, they have moved swiftly to contain and shape its forces in ways that mirror their national interests. Not since satellite television removed the last vestiges of informational sovereignty by enabling nations to forcibly beam their narratives and beliefs inside the borders of foreign countries have governments dealt with such a loss of control. Yet, as Google General Counsel David Drummond noted in 2013, those governments “have learned in what might be the steepest learning curve in history that they can shape this global phenomenon called the Internet and in ways that often go beyond what they can do in the physical world and they’re doing so at an alarming pace.” As the world’s cultures collide in the digital sphere and our nation-based societies show little signs of converging on a universal global set of internet rules, is a fragmented future for our once unified internet inevitable?
The internet has profoundly reshaped our informational landscape. No longer do a small pool of elite gatekeepers in each country control informational access. Instead, the failure of governments to foresee the impact of the web meant its early years were largely left to the hands of technology companies to oversee. The ad-supported nature of these platforms meant they naturally gravitated towards freely provided user-generated content, creating distribution systems that enabled anyone in the world to broadcast their thoughts and beliefs in realtime to the entire planet or communicate privately with their friends, neighbors and colleagues.
Over time, the web naturally consolidated into a handful of walled gardens that today have in many ways become the internet itself. These digital dictatorships transcend traditional national borders, enforcing their beliefs, narratives and rules on the world at large.
Rather than a small set of elites in each country setting the ground rules for the internet for their respective societies, a single centralized set of elites in Silicon Valley set the rules for all countries. These rules prioritize profit over privacy and physical safety, are entirely opaque, have no genuine recourse or appeals process and change constantly at the whims of their owners.
Most importantly, these global rules are built on a premise that Silicon Valley represents the perfect pinnacle of human achievement that all peoples on this planet must strive towards as the one true correct set of narratives, beliefs, perspectives and understandings. In essence, Silicon Valley’s enforcement of a single set of global rules of what is permissible to say, see and believe online represents a new generation of enforced cultural colonialism.
Under Silicon Valley’s approach to internet governance there is no room for societies, cultures or beliefs different from its own. Much like its colonial predecessors, the Valley believes the world should look like itself and leverages its near-absolute power over the informational landscape in countries across the world to forcibly delete narratives and beliefs that run contrary to its own and corral entire societies into conforming to what it believes they should be like.
The early internet flourished so successfully because it respected society’s differences.
Across the world people speak different languages, have different backgrounds and experiences, are shaped by different narratives and share different beliefs.
The early internet’s distributed nature was designed for survivability and redundancy, but such an architecture meant it respected our global differences. Entirely by accident, the internet came into being in a way that respected that across the world we are different people.
In contrast, today’s increasingly centralized web is restoring the concept of centralized gatekeepers, but this time replacing country-specific gatekeepers that reflected local cultural narratives and beliefs with a single set of global gatekeepers enforcing Silicon Valley’s version of culture globally.
Under this new centralized gatekeeping model there is no room for difference. Countries are not permitted to have their own unique cultures consisting of narratives and beliefs that differ from those of Silicon Valley. There is only one set of rules and they apply to all countries equally.
Such an approach simply cannot work in a world in which countries have the power to push back.
National governments throughout the world are increasingly finding that Silicon Valley’s profit over privacy and safety mindset is incompatible with their own societal values. Definitions of what constitutes illegal and unethical content also differ wildly across societies.
Rather than forcibly export America’s beliefs to the world to the point of replacing all other cultures, social platforms have instead run into the reality that when cultures collide, governments will take steps to ensure the continuation of what their societies value to protect their cultural heritage.
As Silicon Valley’s beliefs increasingly conflict with those of the rest of the world, there is simply no alternative but for this centralized model to give way.
There are only three possible pathways forward.
The first is that Silicon Valley embraces our collective diversity and differences and replaces its centralized set of rules with country-specific rules that voluntarily fragment themselves. This would ensure global connectivity that reflects local diversity.
The second is that governments across the world pass new legislation that forcibly fractures the internet by creating mutually incompatible rules that balkanize digital regulation. Under this model the companies will either be broken up via legislation or will be forced to change to localized rules, but under the terms of governments across the world, rather than on their own terms.
The third option is both the most Orwellian and perhaps the most likely in the immediate term. Leveraging their immense control over the informational landscape, social media companies could take active control over the narratives in each country, blocking any discussion or embracing of local regulations and promoting narratives that portray their centralized rulesets in a positive light. Given that Facebook and Twitter in particular increasingly form the conduit between civil society and their elected or appointed representatives, it would not take much effort for them to combat the push towards increased regulation.
Putting this all together, it is clear that the current approach of a single centralized set of content rules enforced at planetary scale and their attendant demands for a single uniform society that removes all diversity and difference from the earth’s population is simply not tenable. The centralized web has no choice but to fracture.
In the end, the only question is which path we take towards a fragmented internet and how successful it will be.
