Authoritarian internet makes it impossible to coordinate on all existential risks.

President Joe Biden says he wants to renew America’s democratic alliances. He has outlined a new foreign policy agenda, which aims to reinvigorate democratic values and provide stronger competition to rising authoritarian powers. His administration writes about fighting kleptocracy and climate change, conquering inequality, and standing up for human rights. There’s talk about a “Summit for Democracy” to promote the new agenda. None of it can succeed, though, without an information environment that allows arguments to be won with evidence and allows citizens to deliberate about significant issues in a full, free, and fair conversation. Such an environment does not exist today in the United States or most other democracies. Donald Trump’s defining technological legacy was to demonstrate the vulnerability of citizens of democracies to digital exploitation. As President, he displayed a shrewd ability to manipulate our fractured information environment to his personal advantage, promoting a mix of extreme voices that inflamed polarization and nearly propelled him to a second term. Our authoritarian adversaries, meanwhile, are busy pursuing their own information strategies. China and Russia have defined their “cyber sovereignty” agendas, based on the idea that countries are entitled to make their own rules for governing the internet even if those rules violate universal principles like human rights. U.S. efforts to oppose them have so far been contradictory and confused. Trump may have ramped up rhetorical confrontation with China. In private, however, he undercut his public posture, telling Xi Jinping that the Chinese ruler should “go ahead” with the building of concentration camps for Uighurs. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s messaging failed to unite democratic allies around a common agenda. When Trump did push back against the Chinese tech industry, he adopted some of the same practices for which he had criticized Xi, like impulsively banning China’s WeChat and TikTok apps from the U.S. market and pressing TikTok to offer itself for sale to a Trump political supporter. Trump tried to portray our tech competition with China as a matter of “their side” or “our side;” but since the sides were not defined by common values or even interests, it just looked like bullying, with no power to win over allies. Instead, many in the EU started to view China and America as equally bad options. After Biden’s presidential victory, the EU leaked a memorandum arguing that national tech policies should be unified by “shared values.” Incoming Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said something similar, describing “techno-democracies” that must work together to defend their values against the world’s “techno-autocracies.” But what are these values? Do we know what a democratic information environment looks like anymore? It used to be pretty easy to define the difference between a democratic information environment and a dictatorial one. They had censorship and state-controlled media; we had freedom of speech, pluralism, and the “marketplace of ideas.” Today, in contrast, dictators don’t just censor by constraining the amount of media content: They exploit freedom of expression to flood the environment with so much disinformation that the truth is swamped, a sort of censorship through noise. Some of the most egregious cases occur in democracies like Brazil or the Philippines. Even in Russia and China, leaders don’t just restrict communication but overload or flood information channels. Pluralism, meanwhile, displays a polarization so extreme that it destroys the possibility of a shared reality, let alone a “marketplace of ideas.” Delineating Rights America, of course, is in no position to lecture anyone on the subject of disinformation or tech regulation. Instead, there is a risk that democracies will fracture even further, into “splinternets,” unable to coordinate norms and standards. If so, it will become still easier for authoritarians to set their own rules. Or, if the EU continues with projects like its proposed digital regulations to govern data privacy, platform accountability, and the economic power of “gatekeeping” internet companies, the process could shift Europe away from the U.S. tech sphere. In fact, if growing numbers of countries see little cost to devising their own rules, the world could see a cyber race to the bottom. The best current ideas in this field come from smaller frontline states, like Estonia and Taiwan, for which finding a way to design an open yet secure information environment is often existential. But without the United States, it will be hard to make real progress.