
Former Google chief predicts the Internet will split by 2028 - anastalaz
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/21/former-google-chief-predicts-internet-will-split-by-chinese-web-an-american-one
======
stephengillie
Article title includes the clarifying line: _A Chinese Web and an American
one_. And that split effectively happened years ago.

~~~
graeme
Schmidt meant the Chinese net would extend beyond China.

~~~
stephengillie
Will the Chinanet also have a Great Firewall between Chinese and foreign
connections?

~~~
graeme
Too soon to tell.

------
vjsc
How about Internet splitting up based on large companies?

Facebook already tried it with free basics. Google with its hold on Android
devices is going to go down the same path sooner or later. Apple has already
it's own closed garden. Netflix is doing that to entertainment.

It won't be a surprise if a few years later you have to buy a package web
services from your ISPs and you only see what you pay for. Not like the free
internet we imagined for sure.

~~~
apocalyptic0n3
I feel like Google is already doing it with AMP.

~~~
scoom
And chrome accounts.

~~~
aceon48
AMP Is open source, Microsoft/Bing are on board, and Google recently stepped
back from AMP governance to encourage more parties involved. No one group will
hold more than 1/3 control.

~~~
JoshMnem
Google AMP is not "open source". You might be able to offer suggestions about
it, but it's not like a piece of software that you can fork and develop
independently. Google controls the main reading device (Google Chrome). The
"open source" line is marketing BS.

When I read "no group will hold more than 1/3 control" it sounds like 3 big
players will wink at each other while they pillage the WWW and divide the
spoils.

------
cryoshon
>Schmidt said he thinks people will likely see “fantastic leadership in
products and services from China,” noting the scale of the nation’s business,
the massive wealth being created there and the advance of global trade,
according to the report. But he acknowledged the country’s growing economic
influence may have political consequences: “There’s a real danger that along
with those products and services comes a different leadership regime from
government, with censorship, controls, etc.," CNBC reported.

this is doublespeak of the very highest order.

on the one hand, schmidt is praising china so that google has better chances
of success there. on the other hand, he's admitting that china might be a
totalitarian state presently or in the future.

the dupe is that it isn't a danger for china to start doing censorship or
controlling speech. it's a reality, and now he's trying to gaslight us by
claiming that the reality is false and his impression of it is what is really
true.

china is a totalitarian state. and soon, with google's help and the complicity
of google employees, they will continue to do so with greater efficiency than
before. mao imagined a country where the state was the not merely the highest
power in the land, but the only power. they're getting there.

if their internet splits definitively, they'll use their cordoned internet as
an iron curtain. or perhaps a "bamboo curtain" is the more appropriate term.
they are already well along this path. either way, over a billion people will
be kept in the dark. some will enjoy it. some will not care. and some will die
for their curiosity. schmidt knows this perfectly well.

~~~
meddlepal
> china is a totalitarian state. and soon, with google's help and the
> complicity of google employees, they will continue to do so with greater
> efficiency than before. mao imagined a country where the state was the not
> merely the highest power in the land, but the only power. they're getting
> there.

This isn't Google's problem. They're just a company out to make some money for
the shareholders. If the people of China want Democracy and freedom they need
to fight for it. So far, the Chinese have not done that and do not seem to
care that much about western-style freedom. It is entirely possible that not
all cultures and societies desire the same thing.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Some of the Chinese have done that - Tienamenn Square, Hong Kong democracy
protests, and Taiwanese democracy come to mind. And yes it is Google’s problem
to extent Google is not an amoral monolithic entity but a collection of human
beings all over the world for whom human rights are directly impactful, and
will be even more so as totalitarianism grows and spreads.

At some point we have to stop hiding behind the belief that shareholder value
maximization also inevitably results in human freedom. That’s a post-Coldwar
conceit that was financially lucrative for a time for Western companies, but
which the CCP is doing their best to disprove now.

~~~
candiodari
Man, when you read stuff like this you start realizing: China's firewall DOES
work bidirectionally. There are constant protests in China.

> shareholder value maximization

The biggest causes of abuses in China are the world doing nothing, not when
China was brutally taking over Nepal, not when brutally annexing Hong Kong
(which was brutal despite the dog and pony show put up for the Queen). Hell,
we are mostly choosing China's side over (tiny) annexations in India and
Pakistan.

There were very little protests about the extreme abuses in Xinjang, the
"criminal" organ donor scandals, the lead poisoning of (chinese and western)
children just to use cheaper paint, ...

So yes, you can protest company actions, but first and foremost governments,
most of all the EU, but also the US, are to blame. And of course things like
the UN ... they're ... they're a farce.

The reality is that, imho, Google coming to China will make one hell of a lot
of information available to Chinese citizens. I would expect this to have
positive results, not negative.

We also know what the outcome will most likely be of not doing anything in
China.

It seems to me A > B, do you disagree ? The attitude that doing nothing is
superior to taking action is toxic and stupid. But yes, some very bad actions
will have to be taken because that evil government demands it, and yes, some
people here will need to do that.

But the first point is: the Chinese firewall clearly needs piercing from the
western side as well. Here's more recent, mostly large scale, Chinese
incidents, lightly categorized:

Labour abuse:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/13/china-coal-protests-
highligh...](https://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/13/china-coal-protests-highlight-
overcapacity-tensions.html)

(there have been years of constant protests everywhere in the Chinese coal
industry, for at least years since 2013 or so)

[https://thediplomat.com/2018/08/communist-chinas-
crackdown-o...](https://thediplomat.com/2018/08/communist-chinas-crackdown-on-
labor-protesters/)

Racist state attitudes/discrimination:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_rio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_riots)

Pro-democracy and Hong Kong:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Hong_Kong_protests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Hong_Kong_protests)

[https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/09/protests-hong-kong-
hi...](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/09/protests-hong-kong-high-speed-
rail-link-china-180922092549498.html)

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-
china-40406429](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-40406429)

(one thing about the Chinese state total control, they want to control
everything, including of course language. And they do it with a very heavy
hand)

Generally protests against the state and party, with various focus points:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Chinese_pro-
democracy_pro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Chinese_pro-
democracy_protests)

[http://uk.businessinsider.com/china-students-missing-
after-r...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/china-students-missing-after-riot-
police-storm-apartment-to-stop-protest-2018-8?r=US&IR=T)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-protest-over-cash-
strappe...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-protest-over-cash-strapped-
citys-school-plan-turns-violent-1535886485)

[https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/31/asia/vaccine-protest-
scan...](https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/31/asia/vaccine-protest-scandal-
china-intl/index.html)

[https://money.cnn.com/video/news/2018/08/08/chinese-
lending-...](https://money.cnn.com/video/news/2018/08/08/chinese-lending-
companies-government-protests-p2p-matt-rivers.cnnmoney/index.html)

[https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/protest-
beatings-0906...](https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/protest-
beatings-09062018124710.html)

------
ams6110
It's also spitting between EU and the rest of the world, e.g. a number of site
block EU visitors due to GDPR.

And I routinely block China and Russia from servers I set up, because 95% of
the break in attempts come from there.

------
jwilk
Archived copy without GDPR nag screen:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180924153131/https://www.washi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180924153131/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/21/former-
google-chief-predicts-internet-will-split-by-chinese-web-an-american-one/)

~~~
konschubert
The irony...

------
3pt14159
The only way to truly split the internet is to have extremely harsh violation
provisions. Otherwise citizens can use satellite phones.

Unless we consider China to already be "split" from the rest of the internet,
which it isn't for people with means, but is practically for the everyday
person.

~~~
JeremyBanks
Hacker News is the best parody of itself.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Can you explain this more? I'm not arguing with you, I just don't fully
understand the context of the joke.

~~~
amyjess
There is an unfortunate tendency for people on HN to think that HN is a
representative sample of the population. They assume that the whole world
cares about the same things HNers cares about, shares the same hobbies, has
the same interest in DIY and technical things.

I'm not just calling HN out here. _Every_ community has some kind of bubble
effect where members of that community think they're a representative sample
of the whole world.

And, at times, that lack of self-awareness occasionally rises to such extreme
levels that Poe's Law is invoked, and you can't tell the difference between
someone caught deep in the bubble and someone taking the piss. Hence why HN
can come off as a parody of itself sometimes.

One example is suggesting that people in oppressive regimes will just switch
to satellite phones because they want a free and open Internet _that badly_.
Another, which I linked elsewhere in the thread, is somebody poo-poohing
Dropbox when it launched because "you can already build such a system yourself
quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs,
and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" [0]. Really, how much of
Dropbox's demographic is even going to know what these technologies are much
less are willing to take the time and effort to build such a setup themselves?
Or, for an example outside of HN, Slashdot's CmdrTaco poo-poohing the iPod
with "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." [1].

And, yes, there are HN parodies out there where you can see just what kind of
content here gets parodied. [2]

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

[1] [https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-
releases-i...](https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-
ipod)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373)

(and as a side not, I do like how HN now has a rule against casually
dismissing people's work, because it does help address this problem)

~~~
3pt14159
No I really think you misunderstand my point.

My point wasn't that sat phones are going to be ubiquitous it was that
actually splitting the internet is impossible. Downlink is ridiculously fast
and uplink is fast enough to ask for data. Once you get data on the ground its
on the other side of the Internet wall, which means that if there are private
networks at all they'll get the data.

You can't block the flow of information. You can just mold it and shift it
now. And that is what the Chinese state is doing. They are fully aware who has
real internet and they let some of them have it. They're essentially
pragmatists.

------
ewgoforth
This is pretty much a return to the mid nineties AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy,
etc. era.

------
smhenderson
Previous discussion here:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/20/eric-schmidt-ex-google-
ceo-p...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/20/eric-schmidt-ex-google-ceo-predicts-
internet-split-china.html?__source=sharebar|linkedin&par=sharebar)

~~~
adamrezich
You mean
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18047825](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18047825)

~~~
smhenderson
Yes, thank you. That's what I get for posting too early in the morning.

------
jedrek
I'm tired of these kinds of big predictions because there is absolutely no
penalty for being wrong.

------
at-fates-hands
This whole article reads like a promotion for China which comes on the heels
of several reports about Google helping China cracking down on dissidents.

To me, this is a Google PR piece, nothing more.

------
browsercoin
This is assuming that the communist party of china will be able to maintain
their grip.

I'd say it's far more likely to see China split up much like the old USSR did
by 2028. They are even making the exact same mistakes like building roads and
infrastructure in central asia.

If you've been following China for a while, you will see how nervous the
leadership is, and like Putin, opted for "military achievements" to rally
troops, and now facing a recession born out of the US-China trade war and all
the social revolt and ethnic separatism oppressed for so long will explode.

Information is like entropy. It can't be contained. China's internet only
works because they are willing to kill people over tweets and harvest their
organs. You can't keep this up.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> I'd say it's far more likely to see China split up much like the old USSR
> did by 2028.

At the library the other day my eye was caught by a book on the shelf about
the “looming collapse of China”. I took it down, saw that the back cover
augured that China would surely collapse within 5 years... and then I opened
the book to the copyright page and saw that it was published in the early
millennium. Forecasts that any country is going to collapse can really miss
the target in retrospect.

> They are even making the exact same mistakes like building roads and
> infrastructure in central asia.

The USSR’s ultimately fatal mistake was a bloated military sector and the
planned economy. Its development efforts in Central Asia are not typically
viewed as a big mistake, and Moscow’s ability to extract resources from
Central Asia probably staved off the collapse for a time. If you have seen
someone claim otherwise, perhaps you could post a citation?

> all the ... ethnic separatism

In fact, China’s brutal panopticon police state has probably neutered ethnic
separatism. Yes, Tibetans and Uighurs harbour grievances, but the sheer number
of Han Chinese settling in those regions, and the total control of
communications and people’s movements, means it is unlikely that those peoples
would ever be able to adequately network to push for change. For those of us
interested in how ethnic minorities fared under the USSR, China’s efforts to
supress their minorities are at a whole different level.

------
anticensor
Obligatory xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/865](https://xkcd.com/865)

------
techntoke
Hopefully it will split away from JavaScript.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
It would be actually quite nice to split the Web into two very distinct parts,
but not Chinese and American as Schmidt predicts, but into documents and apps.
Documents is the traditional, HTML-based web, that must absolutely stay open.
The apps part is the aspect that is constantly evolving, and that becomes more
and more complex year by year, and already DRM and other non-free and non-open
components are implemented in popular browsers so that people may use it to
access protected content.

We might as well stop pretending there is one web and split it into two. I
will continue to use the document-based web using lightweight browser that
don't need any JS functionality, and will only venture to the app-based "web"
when I need, probably using another browser, maybe even in a virtual machine.

