This month, we received a grave prophecy from Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Talk of an international internet fragmentation has been whispered and rumored for years, but Schmidt recently came out and said the words we were afraid to hear: “I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America.”
If proven correct, this hypothesis would leave a profoundly depressing aftertaste on what is arguably the greatest triumph of the past couple of decades. The internet has been able to accomplish what so much foreign policy and international mediation could not – one big community of shared information, a dialogue between countries that runs not just alongside political machinations, but that resonates equally powerfully between common folk, no matter what country they may live in. To witness a schism that breaks that net into two or more separate entities would be heartbreaking.
Why China is winning the race to 5G
Read Now ►What supporting evidence is there?
Schmidt went on to explain that “Chinese Internet is a greater percentage of the GDP of China” than the U.S. internet is to ours. “The scale of the companies that are being built, the services being built, the wealth that is being created is phenomenal.”
According to the IMF number crunch, while Hong Kong’s growth rate did lose some traction in 2016, China remains one of the richest countries in the world. Transsion, for example, is a Chinese smartphone manufacturer that has seized the entire African continent, leaving its American counterparts in the dust. With over 7 million people and money to spend, the competition is real, and the threat of a splintered internet starts to become more believable.
“Globalization means that they get to play, too,” Schmidt continued. “I think you’re going to see fantastic leadership in products and services from China. There’s a real danger that along with those products and services comes a different leadership regime from government, with censorship, controls, etc.”
That different leadership plays a bigger role than you might think. As early as 2015, Techcrunch writer Danny Chrichton hinted that “across the world it is becoming abundantly clear that the internet is no longer the independent and self-reliant sphere it once was, immune to the peculiarities of individual countries and their laws.”
Other governments are sinking their hooks into the internet, and it’s no surprise that the result is everyone trying to pull off a piece themselves. Shared control will obviously not work as long as countries around the world continue to uphold vastly different ideologies, cultures, and divergent economies.
The greatness and danger of WeChat: China’s Super App
Read now ►Is there any good news?
A little. So far, the Trump administration’s strategy regarding China has been repeated rounds of tariffs and trade barriers in an attempt to encourage Americans to buy inward and stop investing money in Chinese products. The issue is that the administration has not put nearly enough focus on ensuring that American values around the internet are exported to continents across the globe. Even if Americans stop buying Chinese products, other countries will continue to as long as they are comparable, affordable and easily accessible. All we’re doing is closing our own door.
So where is this good news? The good news is that the Trump administration is finally preparing to give more attention to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. That means more commercial lending facilities will be accessible to developing countries. “Maybe that measure will be successful in closing the strategic distance between the two countries,” writes Chrichton. “It would be merged into another agency and given a much more rich budget (as high as $60 billion) to go and compete with Chinese financing around the world.”
Maybe. It would be a start, but whether it will be enough to save a diverging internet is hard to say.
