Read part two and part three.
The U.S. and China are engaged in what many consider a “tech cold war.” This sense of technological bifurcation tends to be understood like U.S.-China relations are often understood more broadly — using black-and-white Cold War logic.
But this idea that the U.S.-China rivalry is creating a “digital iron curtain” and leading to the fragmentation of the global internet has more to do with geopolitical and economic competition than it has to do with the integrity of the internet at the structural level, Bulelani Jili, a PhD candidate at Harvard University specializing in Africa-China relations and internet policy, told Domino Theory.
The following article, the first part of a three-part series on the economic impact of internet fragmentation, focuses on the basic structure of the internet, often referred to as the technical layer of the internet. Interviews with several experts in this field confirm that China does not seek to fragment the internet at the technical level. The internet is too fundamental to the global economy to break, and China can get away with controlling its domestic information environment without undermining the basic structure of it.
Technical Fragmentation is the Most Absolute Form of Internet Fragmentation
At the most basic level, internet fragmentation is the splintering of the globally connected internet into isolated networks controlled by governments or companies. Beyond this general idea, internet fragmentation is not a clearly defined term because there are a number of different ways that the internet can be splintered.
In the context of China’s internet policies, censorship, data localization and proposals for new internet protocols could all be considered fragmentary because they impede individuals and entities from engaging with the global internet. But there is a qualitative difference in the impact (to both the internet and China’s economy) of China’s censorship and data localization policies versus changes to internet protocol or other technical standards. While censorship and data localization primarily have to do with the content that travels the internet, changes to the technical layer of the internet impact the fundamental ability of computers to communicate with each other. Analogously, the content is the train that runs along the technical layer of the internet, which forms the tracks.
Internet protocols — such as data formatting, naming, addressing and routing standards — constitute the technical layer, or the language of the internet. “If two computers stop communicating to one another,” Riccardo Nanni, an adjunct professor at the University of Padua and expert on China’s influence over global internet governance, explained, referring to the use of uninteroperable protocols, “that’s where the internet breaks.”
While policies that regulate the flow of information may impact peoples’ abilities to access or share information, they can be circumvented if the internet is infrastructurally interoperable. For example, Chinese censorship laws prohibit Chinese citizen’s access to politically sensitive information. However, with a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, which allows the user to appear as though they are browsing from a different location, this information could still be accessed because the user’s computer can communicate with the global internet. VPN use is widespread in China — over 30% of internet users in China regularly use VPNs.
Thus, fragmentation of the technical layer is the most absolute form of internet fragmentation. If computers cannot communicate with each other, then individuals cannot access or share information. The right to seek and receive information is enshrined in the United Nation’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
China Doesn’t Want to Fragment the Global Internet at the Technical Level
Technical interoperability requires shared standards. This begs the question, is China trying to create a parallel internet ecosystem with different standards, undermining technical interoperability?
Certainly, China has tried to exert influence over the technical layer of the internet. Nanni recounted that China initially tried to push for the reform of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in the 1990s and early 2000s. ICANN is a nonprofit organization responsible for managing the domain name system (DNS), which translates domain names (like www.dominotheory.com) into machine readable IP addresses so that internet users can find websites. This is a crucial component of the technical layer of the internet. China initially wanted ICANN competencies to be transferred to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) because the ITU, as a state-led U.N. agency, would allow the government to wield more influence over decision-making. In contrast, ICANN is a multi-stakeholder organization, incorporating non-state actors from the private sector and civil society. But ICANN took root within the system and China ultimately accepted it, settling for some compromises. For example, although Taiwan remains a member of ICANN, it is named Chinese Taipei so as not to imply statehood.
Chinese companies continue to exert their influence over the global governance of the technical layer of the internet. For example, Huawei pitched the idea of “New IP” in an ITU meeting in 2019. There was a lot of concern at the time that China was trying to fundamentally change the structure of the internet. But according to Nanni, it became clear that “New IP” wasn’t really “a core revision of the way internet based communication works,” but rather a white paper proposing a very niche, technical framework for machine-to-machine communication.
“I think these days [China] is avoiding [harming interoperability],” Nanni said, adding that China is “promoting domestic industry to become strong and shape the future development of global standards but … global standards are not separate ones.”
China does not want to fragment the global internet at the technical level because 1) an interoperable internet is key to international trade and economic growth and 2) the government can get away with controlling the flow of information domestically without fundamentally harming interoperability.
Interoperability with the global internet allows China to engage with the global digital economy. Cross-border banking, payment systems and trade finance all require an interoperable internet, which facilitates efficient communication between different organizations and countries and the instantaneous movement of money. China is also eager to continue engaging with global networks on AI development (such as open-source software), despite increasing restrictions on what it can access. And academics in China — who are increasingly contributing to international publications — rely on the global internet to access research and collaborate internationally.
Interoperability also allows technology companies “to build one device with certain specifications, and that device can connect to the internet everywhere,” said Nanni. Companies can in turn benefit from economies of scale because they don’t need to build different devices according to different technical standards.
Even if China wanted to unilaterally alter the technical layer of the internet, it probably couldn’t. Take the domain name system, which allows internet users to find websites. As a globally distributed and collectively governed system, it operates independently of national boundaries.
Luckily for China, the aspects of the internet that primarily have to do with the content that travels on it have developed in such a way that allows the government to exert control over the domestic information environment while remaining interoperable.
Nick Merrill, director of the Daylight Lab at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, explained that the internet was originally envisioned as a point-to-point network, which allowed computers to directly communicate to each other. But this model was inefficient and insecure, so in the late-1990s, the content distribution model was introduced.
Under this model, a small number of private actors (like Amazon and Google) serve as intermediaries to make the flow of information more efficient by essentially storing copies of the content in proxy servers around the world. This optimizes the distribution of web traffic and allows us to access content quickly. China’s domestic content distribution infrastructure is primarily provided by state-linked companies like Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu. This model allows China to more effectively integrate state-control over information flow.
“The reason why China was able to succeed [in exerting control over the internet] is because the internet evolved into a form that is amenable to centralized control,” said Merrill.
Another development that facilitated China’s centralized control over domestic information flows was China’s decision in the 1990s to not be a part of global telecom infrastructure, according to Martina Ferracane, an associate professor in international digital trade at Teesside University. Since the data that traverses globally does not go through China on the way to its final destination, there are only a few internet gateways into the country: China Unicom, China Telecom and China Mobile. These three state-controlled telecommunications companies enable the government to exert centralized control over internet traffic.
Put simply, the internet works for China. China largely doesn’t mess with technical interoperability because it doesn’t want to and probably can’t. And its desire to control the information environment domestically while remaining interoperable is evidently doable. But this doesn’t mean China’s internet policies won’t have adverse economic impacts. The following essays in this series will focus more specifically on data localization and censorship in China.
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