10 years the top 10 internet companies were American. Today, 6 of the top 10 are Chinese. And this is about what kind of internet we want. Do we want an internet that’s based on the values of free expression or where the government gets to decide what’s allowed to be said? You know, do we want an internet where the individuals are the players or where the government itself is a major player? … America has de facto run the internet and it’s based on American values because the companies were American and if that shifts to China, we will have a very different internet. . .What comes behind breaking up the US tech companies is not another US tech company right now. What clearly comes behind if you look at the numbers and the usage and the support they have, are Chinese companies. And that’s a decision we have to make as a company, as a society.Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook.1
On the face of it, Sandberg seems to have summed up the current state of the debate over internet governance (henceforth, IG). Do we maintain, on the one hand, that the internet should continue as it is with the individual right of freedom of expression enshrined as a guiding principle or can we countenance, on the other hand, a future where national governments determine how the internet is governed? The choice looks stark and for many the chasm between multistakeholderism and multilaterialism or what Nazli and Clark dub the distributed U.S. and the centrist China approach (Nazli and Clark 2013), makes the choice a foregone conclusion (Bradshaw and Denardis 2018; Carr 2015; Mueller 2017). Apart from those who for one reason or another are without choice, there are few adults who would opt to be more rather than less restricted in their use of a system of communication, trade and exchange than need be. The free world must rise to defend its liberalism against the creeping “neo-authoritarian” credo of Chinese communism (Jiang 2013). Indeed, as Singer and Friedman write, “many are now framing the US-Chinese relationship in cyberspace as a digital echo of that between the United States and USSR during the Cold War” (Singer and Friedman 2014). Whatever their stance what scholars of IG agree on is this: the internet is now so integrated into our daily lives (in the developing and developed world) and hence, socially, culturally, politically and economically influential that to leave the question of how the system(s) is governed to goodwill, ad hoc software engineering and make-do protocols is akin to misplaced trust. To decide on how the internet is governed we need, to paraphrase Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, to “ensure that the society we build with the [Internet] is of the sort we intend” (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 1999, p. 133). To not decide is to leave the continuing function of the Internet to the “relatively flat, open, sprawling, ad hoc, and amorphous” structure that has worked so far (Bygrave and Michaelsen 2009, p. 92).
Where, you ask, is the harm in that? If the Internet had retained its modest size as an intertwined network of networks, shared between the military, engineers, scientists and academics in the Anglocentric world, rather than global network it is now, the task of IG would not have needed to stretch to much more than addressing “technical design and administrative issues” (DeNardis 2014, p. 20). The problem of how to go about IG begins, then, with an issue of scale. With the masses of data we generate, create, consume and circulate daily via the Internet, a lack of genuine oversight over how the data – personal, public and shared – is handled leaves individuals, communities, nations and a significant portion of the world vulnerable to mischief, manipulation and harm (Gillespie 2018) as demonstrated by the revelations about Cambridge Analytica (Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko 2019, p. 1) and, those of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning (Van Cleave 2013). Data breaches and compromised networks are what cybersecurity fears and measures seek to eradicate. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enacted in 2018 is one initiative devised to guard the privacy of Europe’s citizens.2 At the very least, the GDPR should deter mishandling of personal data yet as the EU’s own survey of small businesses found recently the gap between awareness and knowledge of the regulation, and its enforcement is wider than imagined.3 The EU might have put a check on the compromise of customer and user data by big businesses (Kazzini 2019), still, in practice, what would be the effect of businesses separating the personal data of EU citizens from that of others? The experiment conducted and featured by the New York Times in 2018 (Singer and Prashant 2018) demonstrated the gulf between the amount of personal data on themselves individuals can obtain from digital platforms Amazon, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, their mobile providers and digital marketing analytics companies from the UK and the US. Microsoft has gotten round the problem by placing customers in control of their own data through a privacy dashboard (Brill 2018). The next issue that arises is how GDPR compliance might affect the interoperability of the Internet.
Interoperability is the mantra of every engineer whose designs are intended to enable the flow, be that of people, electricity and information. To compromise compatibility between the various parts and layers, in both soft and hardware terms, is to place the seamless function of the somewhat haphazardly governed Internet in jeopardy. Broadly speaking, interoperabilty rests on all parties concerned agreeing upon, setting and adhering to said standards to ensure differences are smoothed out. Transport and communication technologies were among the earliest beneficiaries of interoperability. From the first transcontinental railways (Harding 1845) and radio systems to telephone networks, interoperability hinges on faithful application of standards. Interoperability facilitates scaling. What is often obscured when standards are established, is the advantage accrued to whoever leads and establishes the standard. These days most technical standards are set by corporations based in nation-states rather than individuals so the advantage of being the originator also extends to their country of origin. This is why the U.S. government is adamant that 5G (fifth generational) technology developed by China’s Huawei should not be established as the standard. Putting aside the generational leaps 5G would bring to all digital networks and users, the economic advantages of being the standard setter are enormous. As Fägersten and Rühlig (2019, p. 3) from the Swedish Institute of International Affairs observe:
Technical standard setting might appear to be a consensual search for the technically most appropriate solution leading to absolute gains such as lower transaction costs, more efficient markets and subsequent economic growth. After all, the interoperability of products should facilitate economic growth and trade. In contemporary world affairs, however, technical standardization is more and m...