The internet was never truly open but even if it collapses there’s no impact – at worst countries can regulate their own internets which they already do

Shira Ovide, August 10 2020, “The Global Internet Is a Mirage,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/technology/global-internet.html

The U.S. government’s proposed ban on Chinese apps like  plays into technologists’ fears that the internet utopia is crumbling.

The worry is that instead of a world brought closer together by the internet, a tech fight between the United States and China threatens to further  along country borders.

I share those concerns. But let me explain why a splintered internet isn’t so novel, or necessarily a horrible thing.

First, the internet was never as global or interconnected as the ideal. What we mean when we talk about a unified global internet is a history in which the internet was dominated by America, with U.S. companies and U.S. values infusing the world. The exception was China, which operated a parallel internet world.

For years, foreign governments at times pushed back at the American-tinged internet. They sometimes had understandable reasons. Germany, for example, has strong norms of personal privacy and strict rules against denial of the Holocaust. That has  with the American internet companies’ standards of  and .

Other times, governments have imposed restrictions on online activity to from their . Whether or not we agree with such tactics, the internet has never been a single global blob where borders didn’t matter.

And do we want it to be? I’m an American, and I prefer our relatively freewheeling internet to what exists in Russia or Vietnam. But I also recognize that each country has its own tax codes, labor laws and auto safety regulations. When Ford makes car bumpers, it has to figure out how to alter designs to meet different safety rules in Italy and Nigeria.

There are technical reasons that it’s trickier to make country-to-country rules about a website than the strength of car bumpers. But the idea of internet policy changing when you go from Brazil to Argentina is not crazy.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing to worry about. I’m concerned that ,  restricting what people can say online or  costs people digital lifelines to the outside world, and that the internet is one more way for authoritarian regimes to exert dominance.

But it’s not productive to pine for a utopian internet that never really existed. When technologists lament the fracturing of the internet world, I wonder if what they’re really mourning is the fracturing of the world, period.