Four internets
Four internets
The authors describe four emerging views of how best to govern the internet, each playing a geopolitical role and championed at the national level. The Silicon Valley Open Internet reflects the idealism of the internet’s creators, who engineered it to be open, with transparent standards and portable, extensible and interoperable data and software, and also to scale as it grew. The Brussels Bourgeois Internet, imagines trolling and bad behaviour minimized and privacy protected, possibly at the cost of innovation. The Beijing Paternal Internet uses surveillance and identification technologies help ensure social cohesion and security, to achieve social goals. The DC Commercial Internet understands online resources as private property, whose owners can monetize them and seek market rates for their use. The competition to establish which, if any, of the four internets will prevail (however temporarily) is likely to be strong, and not always focused on win-wins. Further, the Internet’s openness is a vulnerability that can be exploited for misinformation or hacking, an opportunity taken by Russia, Iran and North Korea, among others, to produce a fifth model, the Moscow Spoiler Model. The authors argue we need to be prepared for the Internet that we know to evolve unpredictably, as the second half of humanity comes online, and work to ensure that it remains beneficial for humankind.
Geopolitics, openness, Internet governance, Privacy, Paternalism, China, India, United States, European Commission, Russia, hacking
28-30
O'hara, Kieron
0a64a4b1-efb5-45d1-a4c2-77783f18f0c4
Hall, Wendy
11f7f8db-854c-4481-b1ae-721a51d8790c
24 February 2020
O'hara, Kieron
0a64a4b1-efb5-45d1-a4c2-77783f18f0c4
Hall, Wendy
11f7f8db-854c-4481-b1ae-721a51d8790c
O'hara, Kieron and Hall, Wendy
(2020)
Four internets.
Communications of the ACM, 63 (3), .
(doi:10.1145/3341722).
Abstract
The authors describe four emerging views of how best to govern the internet, each playing a geopolitical role and championed at the national level. The Silicon Valley Open Internet reflects the idealism of the internet’s creators, who engineered it to be open, with transparent standards and portable, extensible and interoperable data and software, and also to scale as it grew. The Brussels Bourgeois Internet, imagines trolling and bad behaviour minimized and privacy protected, possibly at the cost of innovation. The Beijing Paternal Internet uses surveillance and identification technologies help ensure social cohesion and security, to achieve social goals. The DC Commercial Internet understands online resources as private property, whose owners can monetize them and seek market rates for their use. The competition to establish which, if any, of the four internets will prevail (however temporarily) is likely to be strong, and not always focused on win-wins. Further, the Internet’s openness is a vulnerability that can be exploited for misinformation or hacking, an opportunity taken by Russia, Iran and North Korea, among others, to produce a fifth model, the Moscow Spoiler Model. The authors argue we need to be prepared for the Internet that we know to evolve unpredictably, as the second half of humanity comes online, and work to ensure that it remains beneficial for humankind.
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OHara Hall Four Internets CACM accepted version
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ohara hall cacm four internets
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Accepted/In Press date: 19 June 2019
Published date: 24 February 2020
Additional Information:
"© ACM, YYYY. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.
Keywords:
Geopolitics, openness, Internet governance, Privacy, Paternalism, China, India, United States, European Commission, Russia, hacking
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 431974
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/431974
ISSN: 0001-0782
PURE UUID: 614ef4ce-1ef9-4375-97ca-39af762635a9
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Date deposited: 25 Jun 2019 16:30
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 03:20
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