Internet freedom key to sustain global interdependence

(Ryan David, “US Leadership in Cyberspace: Transnational Cyber Security and Global Governance.” Cyberspace and International Relations: Theory, Prospects and Challenges, pp. 169-170.)

The Open Door holds that US policymakers subscribe to a worldview where the security of the United States rests on sustained economic and political expansion abroad (Beard 1934; Williams 1959; also see Bacevich 2002; Layne 2006, 1998). Adas (2006) has shown that US policymakers from the founding of the United States through the present consistently leverage technology in pursuit of that expansion. Beginning in late 1994 and continuing to the present, US policymakers initiated and sustain a policy to repurpose the Internet as a platform for the expansion of American products and political ideals (Kiggins 2011). From the view of US policymakers, the social purpose of the Internet in the post-Cold War era is to serve as a platform for expanding free-market commerce and free speech, for globally expanding information and economic exchange (Kiggins 2011). To ensure the Internet is used in accordance with this social purpose, US policymakers have constructed a discourse around the Internet founded on the principle of openness (Antonova 2008; McCarthy 2011). US policymakers discursively promote and protect the Internet as an open domain in order to create global institutional conditions that are favorable for global expansion of information and economic exchange consistent with the worldview of US policymakers. Castells (1999) has shown how the Internet assists globalization by linking states in a deepening web of economic interdependence that characterizes this era of global capitalism shaped by the United States and other allied advanced industrialized democracies. Evidence of the growing economic import of the Internet supports the claim that the Internet is an increasingly vital global platform for exchange.

By 2015, total international trade over the Internet, more commonly referred to as global electronic commerce, is projected to be SI .4 trillion and is expected to continue to grow at a 13.5 % compounded annual growth rate for the foreseeable future (Enright 2011). Mann and Kierkegaard (2006, 25) estimate that global electronic commerce adds roughly .25 basis points of growth to annual GDP for industrialized nations. In the case of the United States, that translates to over $400 billion added to US GDP per year. While 53 % of all global electronic commerce transactions occur in the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom, developing countries such as Brazil, China, Russia, and Mexico are projected to experience electronic commerce growth at an annual rate of 26% for the foreseeable future (Enright 2011). A shift is underway where global electronic commerce moves from the developed world to the developing world driven, in part, by successful economic development strategies that are creating consumer classes in those countries and, in part, by the expansion of mobile telecommunications networks throughout the developing world. More consumers, on a global scale, plug into cyber space through their new mobile devices such smart phones and tablet computers reflecting a shift from desktop computing to cloud computing. This shift will deepen interdependence, shrinking the distance between private Internet based computing and public Internet based computing (Castells 1999, 1996). With this shift in computing, global consumption patterns may change, and, with that change in consumption patterns may come change in global trade, economic production, employment, and political institutions (Ibid.). The Arab spring could be construed as reflecting these tectonic shifts in the global political economy that are amplified and accelerated by cyber based and enabled communications technologies. Combined, the Stuxnet virus, the cyber attack on Google and thirty-three other US enterprises, and the growing import of the Internet to global trade and information flows argue against a state-centric framework of cyber security that elides the role that the Internet plays in deepening linkages among state and non-state actors (Keohane and Nye 2001).