
‘Cybersovereignty’ Splits the Once World Wide Web - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-02/how-cybersovereignty-splits-the-once-world-wide-web-quicktake
======
0xcde4c3db
There's allegedly been a thriving industry of in-person data transfers in
Cuba, where people get their portable media loaded up every week with the
latest pirated/banned media [1]. I wonder if more isolationist or censorship-
oriented embodiments of this sort of policy could lead to that model (and
loosely similar ideas like USB/Wi-Fi dead drops [2]) becoming more widespread.

[1] [https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-
world/world/article2...](https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-
world/world/article24778222.html)

[2] [https://www.computerworld.com/article/2597815/dead-drops-
off...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2597815/dead-drops-
offline-p2p-file-sharing-network-goes-global.html)

~~~
iamnothere
I have thought about this; it would be good to have a common "protocol"
established for searching, requesting, and (eventually) retrieving documents
over sneakernet. Perhaps some sort of updateable index passed along with the
documents, and an anonymous register of what files are being requested. I
envision sort of a physical version of Tor, where nobody knows who has what
files or who is requesting what files; the only thing you know is who you just
exchanged info with, but you don't know if the new requests/files came from
them or from the next hop on the network. This could serve as a backup if the
network becomes unavalable in the long term (due to a war, for instance) or if
severe repression is put in place, restricting access to information.

~~~
tenebrisalietum
Recoll works great to maintain a local searchable database of text documents.
If you create a text record for each media item it could work.

------
BitSmuggler
Soon, we’ll have a new crime called “bit smuggling” and it will involve buying
a light switch fixture from the hardware store, and flipping it to the _wrong_
on/off position, and then putting it in your pocket, and trying to cross an
international border with it in that position.

~~~
blotter_paper
I love that you made that account just for that post.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I want to have that account name now :-)

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no_identd
I'll claim something seemingly controversial now:

No noteworthy 'Internet' currently exists, and what this article talks about
comes about as a consequence of exactly that.

Don't believe me?

Try these slides:

[http://rina.tssg.org/docs/DublinLostLayer140109.pdf](http://rina.tssg.org/docs/DublinLostLayer140109.pdf)

Or, if you prefer more academic detail:

[http://rina.tssg.org/docs/How_in_the_Heck_do_you_lose_a_laye...](http://rina.tssg.org/docs/How_in_the_Heck_do_you_lose_a_layer.pdf)

(Citations here:
[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1615656212926930603...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=16156562129269306037))

I really wish the RINA and GNUnet projects would start working together
instead of just... Each doing their own thing entirely, and not even
acknowledging each other. Otherwise, we'll just face the very same "two
separate working groups leading to a total clusterfuck which most people don't
even notice as existing" problem outlined above by John Day.

------
vthriller
Relevant recent discussion about potential extensive internet regulation in
Austria:

"Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe
penalties"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19698003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19698003)

------
naiveai
And these policies are only being egged on by people in the West who favor
censoring hate speech, ostensibly to protect or defend minorities, instead of
confronting dangerous ideologies head-on. It's a sad thing to happen to the
Internet for sure.

~~~
intended
As the other people stated, these things don’t work. More information doesn’t
mean it beats bad information.

Instead, some content is virally structured content and others are not.
Emotional content is, and well crafted propaganda definitely is.

These policies are inevitable. Because at a fundamental information level we
are discussing two different worlds, and one of them requires a tolerance of
illegal and hateful behavior that society behavior will not countenance.

~~~
naasking
> Because at a fundamental information level we are discussing two different
> worlds, and one of them requires a tolerance of illegal and hateful behavior
> that society behavior will not countenance.

Except this tolerance has already been accepted by Western societies in the
form of freedom of religion. You can't have your cake and eat it to: if you're
going to censor 'hate speech', then you're going to have to start censoring
religious speech.

------
shalmanese
This is going to be the big story of the next decade and it's being largely
ignored right now because it's mainly happening around the margins in some
developing countries right now.

China and the US are presenting two very different visions of the web and I
don't think it's as simple as presenting a narrative of West right, East
wrong. For non-aligned countries, I think there are compelling arguments on
both sides in ways that simply aren't relevant for the US.

It's interesting to contrast this with the immigration control/border security
debate where the US has placed itself very far onto the side of "sovereignty"
(that is, the state should have significant and _overriding_ power over
practical, implementational elements of who & what crosses US borders). It's
hard then, for any country not steeped in an existing Western liberal
tradition, to look at the West's hardline stance on border sovereignty and not
see how the equivalent cannot be prioritized for cyber sovereignty should the
state so choose.

Look at Sri Lanka for example, after the bombings, the Sri Lankan government
had a single, binary choice: Shut down all social media or don't shut down any
social media. This is the equivalent of the government only being able to
choose a normally functioning border or a total and complete shut down of the
border because border control facilities are operated by foreign,
uncontactable private entities. Governments are increasingly seeing how this
is an untenable state of affairs and how much of their public policy is now
being outsourced to American, private companies outside of their control.

Outside of China, nobody else really has the clout or scale to build a
somewhat hermetically sealed internet but this is what gives China now the
avenue to export their technologies and present a new vision of how
governments can use cyberspace to achieve policy aims. I believe companies
like WeChat are working on a suite of tools where they will be able to go to
Governments and say "look, we can provide you an install where any message
going between two of your citizens will be stored exclusively inside of your
country in a place Tencent does not have access to and we will provide you
with the entire suite of Government management tools that we currently provide
the Chinese Government on any message that crosses your border." After
something like the Sri Lankan bombing, Sri Lankan censors, hired by the Sri
Lankan government could use Chinese made tools to provide a much more surgical
shaping of the conversation.

This is the strategy credit China is willing to wield (Chinese companies have
much more experience building Government management tools) and it's up to
Western companies to decide whether they want to stick to their principles or
be forced down the same path (any guesses which they will pick?).

For example, there are four key sectors I believe are obviously going to fall
under strong government purview in the coming decade: Messaging, Publishing,
E-Commerce & Transportation.

Imagine if a government told Uber that they have to start recording the real
IDs of every rider and report trip request info in real time to a Government
API where the Govt can veto the ride (so as to detect when protests/riots are
about to start and choke off transportation to the site). If the condition is,
Uber not complying means the Govt means the country kicks Uber out and
replaces it with Didi, is Uber really not going to cave? Even if Uber does
comply, maybe they still give the contract to Didi because Didi has a larger
pool of data in their system and can provide better ML tools to the government
on when public disturbances are going to happen.

This is not to say that all governments will take all the steps, but that it's
going to be increasingly important that _any_ government can take _any_ of the
steps and we're going to increasingly move into a world where tech companies
in key sectors will have to devote as much effort into building Government
Management tools as they will, Community Management tools.

This is what the Cyber Sovereignty movement is all about.

~~~
intended
Not just Sri Lanka - India does it, and there’s regular shut downs of the
internet in sensitive areas.

The China model has won, people on HN just don’t know it yet.

Remember that just a few short weeks ago, Facebook proposed an internet based
regulator for hate speech and other difficult subjective judgements that have
to be made every day.

These are related - this is fundamentally a question of how communities,
cultures and society’s survive on the web. And the short of it is that we
can’t.

The only way society survives the attackers environment of the internet, is by
creating the Chinese fire wall. And narion states are no longer the lumbering
elephants of the 90s and before.

Now patriotic coders are more than happy to help their governments and they
march to a different tune than the peace inspired founders and inventors of
the net.

------
agentofuser
It will be interesting to see what happens after Starlink and competitors make
radio internet ubiquitous. What are they going to do, shoot down satellites?

~~~
atemerev
I am Russian who knows some Soviet history. Here’s what they are going to do:

1) ban all satellite-connecting equipment, unless you have government-issued
license for that;

2) if it fails, they will jam satellite links, at least in large cities;

3) if _that_ fails (and also some show trials of people caught with satellite
modems, to send the message to the others), yes, they will shoot down
satellites.

------
aiyodev
A country shouldn’t be able to profit from the web while blocking other
countries from exchanging ideas and wealth with its citizens. We should
disconnect China.

~~~
majia
China is not profiting much from the world wide web like Google or Facebook.
It mainly profits from its domestic intranet.

Your suggestion is also ironic; how could further disconnecting China help to
prevent China from blocking other countries?

~~~
yorwba
The people building that intranet are making heavy use of resources that
aren't hosted within the country, some of which require circumventing the
Great Firewall (e.g. tensorflow.org is hosted on Google infrastructure and
therefore blocked). Some companies even use Google Docs in their hiring
process to filter out candidates who can't evade government censorship.

Completely cutting China off from the rest of the internet would certainly
lead to infrastructure outages and put all development on hold until mirrors
for the necessary services are set up.

And that's just the tech industry. If a gadget manufacturer in China can't be
reached to order gadgets, they might just as well not exist. Without
communication, international trade breaks down as well. The outcome would be
equivalent to sanctions on all Chinese-made products, which no country is
willing to try due to how much it would hurt themselves.

------
kitotik
The splinterweb is real, and growing.

~~~
Ygg2
Yup. And EU is also working on its own splinter web courtesy of GDPR and
Article 13

~~~
TelmoMenezes
All webs are splinter webs of the EU, since the web was invented here.

~~~
dredmorbius
Nit: "Web" and "Net", or more specifcally, "Internet", are problematic terms.
They're used poorly in TFA's title.

The Web -- WWW -- invented by TBL at Cern, is a set of data representation and
request protocols, but _doesn 't_ address underlying royting and peering, the
domain of the Internet itself, and BGP specifically. The WWW _could_ splinter,
but it would do (and may be doing) so along protocol lines, not underlying
connection levels.

App-level proxies and DNS further complicate the discussion, an legal and
regulatory matters operate at yet another level. Largely these too were not
invented in the EU.

The Bloomberg article is clearly referencing the Internet as a whole, title
ambiguity notwithstanding, and _that_ was created in the United States, not
the EU. As AnonymousPlanet notes, CH is not an EU member state.

So your statement is false.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
Sorry, I forgot about the mentality here for a second. I will spell out the
point I was trying to make through provocation. It destroys the fun/joke, but
whatever...

The Web was invented a few meters away from the EU, in a lab that literally
sits in the border between the EU and a non-EU country that is mostly aligned
with the EU, by a EU citizen, funded mostly by EU money, is the only reason
why anyone cares about the rest of the technology stack and infrastructure
that we call "Internet". It was a dream of creating an interconnected system
of knowledge and communication, that transcended borders and would move
humanity to a higher stage of civilization.

The Web matters because of what it allows one to do, the implementation
details are only relevant in a narrow technical sense.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for many American achievements, and I
grew up thinking that the USA and Europe were close friends and allies,
fundamentally sharing the same values. NASA and its many achievements inspired
my lifelong interest in Science.

I am not nationalistic, and I don't care how invented what. What I am fed up
with, is this USA-centric view of the world, as if freedom emanates from the
USA, without whom we would be condemned to vile authoritarianism. I am also
fed up with the idea that invention comes from VC money, which is largely
untrue. Even the Internet as you describe it was invented using government
money.

~~~
dredmorbius
Nationalism really has nothing to do with my response. A fully-admitted-in-
advance pedantic sense of accuracy does.

The Web _is_ significant. I'm well aware of its history, and the (yes,
publicly-funded) Arpanet and Internet. But the WWW _not_ the whole 'Net, and
other than some path-dependent accidents of history (see Meredith L.
Patterson's "On Port 80" [https://medium.com/@maradydd/on-
port-80-d8d6d3443d9a](https://medium.com/@maradydd/on-port-80-d8d6d3443d9a))
would probably be subsiding now largely due to mobile tech. Designed in
Cupertino, built in China. (And likely designed in China before much longer).

The point remains that TFA talks of partitioning the Internet, not merely the
Web, via mostly Internet-specific, not Web-specific, mechanisms.

Cheers.

~~~
kitotik
I actually intended to type “splinternet” but I think due to years of dadjoke
“interweb” muscle memory typed something else.

~~~
dredmorbius
Splintertubes!

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teh_infallible
No mention whatsoever of the Snowden revelations? Non-US nations have a good
reason to want cyber sovereignty. The US is spying on them and their people.

