Former Google chief predicts the Internet will split by 2028
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Keep in mind, too, that China's Great Firewall was prototyped using "Western" technology and services.
This isn't just China. It reflects fundamental differences in what different organizations and interests want the Internet to be -- and not be.
But, China is making it a turnkey system, for those without the resources or wherewithall to do so for themselves.
Note also precursors, such as in and through the global market for oil. Autocracies propped up and sold military hardware in return for stable access.
Now, digital armament, in return for...
And remember, it started with Westerners, out to make a buck.
Facebook already tried it with free basics. Google with its hold on Android devices is going to go down the same path sooner or later. Apple has already it's own closed garden. Netflix is doing that to entertainment.
It won't be a surprise if a few years later you have to buy a package web services from your ISPs and you only see what you pay for. Not like the free internet we imagined for sure.
When I read "no group will hold more than 1/3 control" it sounds like 3 big players will wink at each other while they pillage the WWW and divide the spoils.
The internet will likely be split in multiple dimensions. Nations will split off. Companies obviously have an incentive to split off. We can see it being split up, for example, racially and along gender lines. Etc etc etc.
And in the final analysis, maybe that's just the flawed component in the architecture of the internet. Humans.
It likely wouldn't matter how easy a technology makes it for us to talk and communicate with each other, most of us will just use said technology to beat each other over the head.
Our use of services make us citizens of these digital countries, where a TOS takes on a whole new meaning of how we are governed, beyond physical borders.
What kind of governance do we want over us in the digital world?
https://nelsnewday.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/stop-cable-monop...
this is doublespeak of the very highest order.
on the one hand, schmidt is praising china so that google has better chances of success there. on the other hand, he's admitting that china might be a totalitarian state presently or in the future.
the dupe is that it isn't a danger for china to start doing censorship or controlling speech. it's a reality, and now he's trying to gaslight us by claiming that the reality is false and his impression of it is what is really true.
china is a totalitarian state. and soon, with google's help and the complicity of google employees, they will continue to do so with greater efficiency than before. mao imagined a country where the state was the not merely the highest power in the land, but the only power. they're getting there.
if their internet splits definitively, they'll use their cordoned internet as an iron curtain. or perhaps a "bamboo curtain" is the more appropriate term. they are already well along this path. either way, over a billion people will be kept in the dark. some will enjoy it. some will not care. and some will die for their curiosity. schmidt knows this perfectly well.
This isn't Google's problem. They're just a company out to make some money for the shareholders. If the people of China want Democracy and freedom they need to fight for it. So far, the Chinese have not done that and do not seem to care that much about western-style freedom. It is entirely possible that not all cultures and societies desire the same thing.
At some point we have to stop hiding behind the belief that shareholder value maximization also inevitably results in human freedom. That’s a post-Coldwar conceit that was financially lucrative for a time for Western companies, but which the CCP is doing their best to disprove now.
> shareholder value maximization
The biggest causes of abuses in China are the world doing nothing, not when China was brutally taking over Nepal, not when brutally annexing Hong Kong (which was brutal despite the dog and pony show put up for the Queen). Hell, we are mostly choosing China's side over (tiny) annexations in India and Pakistan.
There were very little protests about the extreme abuses in Xinjang, the "criminal" organ donor scandals, the lead poisoning of (chinese and western) children just to use cheaper paint, ...
So yes, you can protest company actions, but first and foremost governments, most of all the EU, but also the US, are to blame. And of course things like the UN ... they're ... they're a farce.
The reality is that, imho, Google coming to China will make one hell of a lot of information available to Chinese citizens. I would expect this to have positive results, not negative.
We also know what the outcome will most likely be of not doing anything in China.
It seems to me A > B, do you disagree ? The attitude that doing nothing is superior to taking action is toxic and stupid. But yes, some very bad actions will have to be taken because that evil government demands it, and yes, some people here will need to do that.
But the first point is: the Chinese firewall clearly needs piercing from the western side as well. Here's more recent, mostly large scale, Chinese incidents, lightly categorized:
Labour abuse:
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/13/china-coal-protests-highligh...
(there have been years of constant protests everywhere in the Chinese coal industry, for at least years since 2013 or so)
https://thediplomat.com/2018/08/communist-chinas-crackdown-o...
Racist state attitudes/discrimination:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_rio...
Pro-democracy and Hong Kong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Hong_Kong_protests
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/09/protests-hong-kong-hi...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-40406429
(one thing about the Chinese state total control, they want to control everything, including of course language. And they do it with a very heavy hand)
Generally protests against the state and party, with various focus points:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Chinese_pro-democracy_pro...
http://uk.businessinsider.com/china-students-missing-after-r...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-protest-over-cash-strappe...
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/31/asia/vaccine-protest-scan...
https://money.cnn.com/video/news/2018/08/08/chinese-lending-...
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/protest-beatings-0906...
Western-sytle freedom may be open to changing if something unpleasant is happening elsewhere, no?
and money is more important than human rights? if it is, you'll need to say so explicitly rather than make an excuse for it.
nobody is talking about forcing democracy or freedom on china. this is merely a matter of aggravating the harm their government can inflict on the chinese, or refraining from aggravating harm.
And I routinely block China and Russia from servers I set up, because 95% of the break in attempts come from there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180924153131/https://www.washi...
Unless we consider China to already be "split" from the rest of the internet, which it isn't for people with means, but is practically for the everyday person.
And how many actually will?
I mean really, satellite phones?
Unless we're planning on moving our entire terrestrial mobile data infrastructure to be satellite based, that's just not practical. To even suggest it is just the height of naiveté.
If someone can already provide her family access to LCD Chinese culture, what benefit is there in her going that extra mile to get access to LCD Western culture? (Ignoring the fact that she's probably not even aware there is a difference between a cell phone and a satellite phone in terms of data access. And please, answer that question from the perspective of the average Chinese female secretary just trying to get her kid fed and put to bed every night. And try to answer honestly.)
A historical parallel is the use of shortwave receivers inside the USSR to receive Radio Free Europe. It was illegal to listen to, and the KGB jammed it sometimes, but people listened secretly anyway and it was an important conduit of information into an otherwise mostly closed society.
No it wasn't, really. Have you actually experienced this or are you retelling some long-read from New Yorker? Sorry if it reads as uncalled for personal attack, just that I and my family have much more first-hand experience with this, and while having western news was nice, it really didn't affect the political stability of the regime in any meaningful way.
People are not rational. They don't make decisions based on information presented to them. They mostly just repeat whatever opinion they perceive to be popular, usually without even asking themselves if they believe it or not. Propaganda is not about making people think something. Propaganda is about making people think that most of other people think so.
For sure, a shortwave broadcast isn't going to change the majority opinion the way 24/7 propaganda can. But it can influence a few intellectuals, who in turn influence others. It's impossible to do a randomized controlled trial to measure its effectiveness.
I'm not just calling HN out here. Every community has some kind of bubble effect where members of that community think they're a representative sample of the whole world.
And, at times, that lack of self-awareness occasionally rises to such extreme levels that Poe's Law is invoked, and you can't tell the difference between someone caught deep in the bubble and someone taking the piss. Hence why HN can come off as a parody of itself sometimes.
One example is suggesting that people in oppressive regimes will just switch to satellite phones because they want a free and open Internet that badly. Another, which I linked elsewhere in the thread, is somebody poo-poohing Dropbox when it launched because "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" [0]. Really, how much of Dropbox's demographic is even going to know what these technologies are much less are willing to take the time and effort to build such a setup themselves? Or, for an example outside of HN, Slashdot's CmdrTaco poo-poohing the iPod with "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." [1].
And, yes, there are HN parodies out there where you can see just what kind of content here gets parodied. [2]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
[1] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373
(and as a side not, I do like how HN now has a rule against casually dismissing people's work, because it does help address this problem)
My point wasn't that sat phones are going to be ubiquitous it was that actually splitting the internet is impossible. Downlink is ridiculously fast and uplink is fast enough to ask for data. Once you get data on the ground its on the other side of the Internet wall, which means that if there are private networks at all they'll get the data.
You can't block the flow of information. You can just mold it and shift it now. And that is what the Chinese state is doing. They are fully aware who has real internet and they let some of them have it. They're essentially pragmatists.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/20/eric-schmidt-ex-google-ceo-p...
To me, this is a Google PR piece, nothing more.
I'd say it's far more likely to see China split up much like the old USSR did by 2028. They are even making the exact same mistakes like building roads and infrastructure in central asia.
If you've been following China for a while, you will see how nervous the leadership is, and like Putin, opted for "military achievements" to rally troops, and now facing a recession born out of the US-China trade war and all the social revolt and ethnic separatism oppressed for so long will explode.
Information is like entropy. It can't be contained. China's internet only works because they are willing to kill people over tweets and harvest their organs. You can't keep this up.
At the library the other day my eye was caught by a book on the shelf about the “looming collapse of China”. I took it down, saw that the back cover augured that China would surely collapse within 5 years... and then I opened the book to the copyright page and saw that it was published in the early millennium. Forecasts that any country is going to collapse can really miss the target in retrospect.
> They are even making the exact same mistakes like building roads and infrastructure in central asia.
The USSR’s ultimately fatal mistake was a bloated military sector and the planned economy. Its development efforts in Central Asia are not typically viewed as a big mistake, and Moscow’s ability to extract resources from Central Asia probably staved off the collapse for a time. If you have seen someone claim otherwise, perhaps you could post a citation?
> all the ... ethnic separatism
In fact, China’s brutal panopticon police state has probably neutered ethnic separatism. Yes, Tibetans and Uighurs harbour grievances, but the sheer number of Han Chinese settling in those regions, and the total control of communications and people’s movements, means it is unlikely that those peoples would ever be able to adequately network to push for change. For those of us interested in how ethnic minorities fared under the USSR, China’s efforts to supress their minorities are at a whole different level.
We might as well stop pretending there is one web and split it into two. I will continue to use the document-based web using lightweight browser that don't need any JS functionality, and will only venture to the app-based "web" when I need, probably using another browser, maybe even in a virtual machine.