The internet is at a crossroads. Weakening the power of SDOs is key to a viable future for it.

Jonah Force Hill, “A Balkanized Internet?: The Uncertain Future of Global Internet Standards,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43134338?seq=1

The Internet is at a crossroads. Today, it is generally open, interoperable and unified. Any Internet user can exchange email with more than two billion other global Internet users; entrepreneurs can launch services such as eBay and Amazon and quickly turn them into multibillion- dollar businesses; and people from all across the world can connect with others, share ideas, and improve democratic governance through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Over the past decade, however, an increasing number of journalists and academics have noted - often in alarmist terms - the ways in which government censorship programs, powerful commercial interests, concerns over cybersecurity, and other dynamic changes in the Internet ecosystem are pulling the global network apart into various distinct, idiosyncratic "internets," threatening the global communication, economic prosperity and innovation the Internet has fostered over the past two decades.1

Yet despite the proliferation of articles and commentaries on this "balkanization" of the Internet, there has been little consensus about which parts of the Internet are fragmenting, what changes in the Internet ecosystem are causing the fragmentation to occur, and to what degree these processes should be a concern. This article, drawn from a larger working paper exploring Internet balkanization, will highlight one of the lesser- explored threats to a unified global Internet: the potential collapse of the Internet standards process.

Keeping the Internet Together Through Standards. The Internet is held together as a globally interoperable platform through its common set of technical protocols, message formats and computer languages, collectively known as Internet standards. Internet standards - such as IPv4 and IPv6, Hyper-Text Mark-up Language (HTML), Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) – set the normative technical specifications for communication on the Net. By ensuring the Internet’s reliability, and by providing a predictable marketplace for goods and services, a globally common set of Internet standards has allowed the Internet to rapidly (and comparatively inexpensively) expand around the world.

Yet the organizations and processes that decide which protocols should be adopted as the international standard for a particular networking function are not without their critics. A growing chorus of national governments – including China, Russia, and others – has argued that the organizations and processes that lead to standardization are both outmoded and inequitable. They contend that the current process unfairly favors American firms; that it produces standards with insufficient built-in security; and that it leads to standards hat allow for a degree of freedom fundamentally at odds with the social norms of some nonwestern nations. As a result of these concerns, the technical design decisions that were historically the sole province of engineers and academics have increasingly come under the political pressures of governments seeking to influence and reform them.