CIGI Papers No.

206 — December 2018

Four Internets:
The Geopolitics of
Digital Governance
Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall
CIGI Papers No. 206 — December 2018

Four Internets:
The Geopolitics of
Digital Governance
Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall
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Table of Contents
vi About the Authors

vii About the Global Security & Politics Program

vii Acronyms and Abbreviations

1 Executive Summary

1 Introduction

2 The Creation and Governance of the Internet

3 Openness

5 The Geopolitics of Internet Ideals

12 Discussion: Four Internets and a Free Rider

13 Conclusion

14 Works Cited

17 About CIGI

17 À propos du CIGI
 About the Authors
Kieron O’Hara is an associate professor in
electronics and computer science at the University
of Southampton, UK. His interests are in the
philosophy and politics of digital modernity,
particularly the World Wide Web; key themes
are trust, privacy and ethics. He is the author
of several books on technology and politics, the
latest of which, The Theory and Practice of Social
Machines (Springer, with Nigel Shadbolt, David
De Roure and Wendy Hall), will appear in 2019.
He has also written extensively on political
philosophy and British politics. He is one of the
leads on the UK Anonymisation Network, which
disseminates best practices in data anonymization.

Dame Wendy Hall, DBE, FRS, FREng, is Regius

Professor of Computer Science at the University
of Southampton, UK, and an executive director
of the Web Science Institute at Southampton.
Her influence as one of the first to undertake
serious research in multimedia and hypermedia
has been significant in many areas, including
digital libraries, the development of the Semantic
Web and the emerging discipline of Web Science.
She became a Dame Commander of the British
Empire in 2009 and is a fellow of the Royal Society.
She has been president of the Association for
Computing Machinery, senior vice president of
the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a member
of the UK Prime Minister’s Council for Science
and Technology. She was a founding member
of the European Research Council and chair of
the European Commission’s Information Society
Technologies Advisory Group; a member of the
Global Commission on Internet Governance; and
a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global
Futures Council on the Digital Economy. Dame
Wendy was co-chair of the UK government’s
review of artificial intelligence (AI), Growing
the Artificial Intelligence Industry in the UK
(2017), and became the UK government’s first
“Skills Champion for AI in the UK” in 2018.

vi CIGI Papers No. 206 — December 2018 • Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall
About the Global Security Acronyms and
& Politics Program Abbreviations
The Global Security & Politics Program at CIGI AI artificial intelligence
focuses on a range of issues in global security,
conflict management and international governance CNIL Commission Nationale de
— a landscape that continues to change l’Informatique et des Libertés
dramatically. Such changes are widely evident in
DNS domain name system
the growing rivalry between China and the United
States in the Asia-Pacific and the emergence of new FCC Federal Communications Commission
economic powers in the region, such as Indonesia;
the divergent ways Canada, Russia and the GDPR General Data Protection Regulation
United States perceive Arctic security as melting
ice opens up the Northwest Passage; continuing IETF Internet Engineering Task Force
debates about the humanitarian imperative as
IP Internet Protocol
the world confronts new crises in Africa and the
Middle East; and new areas of concern such as IPv4 IP version 4
cyber warfare and the security of the internet.
IPv6 IP version 6
With experts from academia, national agencies,
international institutions and the private ISPs internet service providers
sector, the Global Security & Politics Program
supports research in the following areas: Arctic SNSs social networking sites
governance; Asia and the Pacific; fixing climate
VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol
governance; governance of conflict management,
with a focus on Africa; global politics and W3C World Wide Web Consortium
foreign policy; and internet governance.

Four Internets: The Geopolitics of Digital Governance vii

Executive Summary Introduction
The internet is not a monolithic architecture whose The internet is not a monolithic technological
existence and form are guaranteed in perpetuity, creation, but a congeries of systems, protocols,
but a fragile and contingent construction of standards, hardware (the infamous “tubes”;
hardware, software, standards and databases, Blum 2012) and organizations. It encompasses
governed by a wide range of private and public the domain name system (DNS), information
actors whose behaviour is constrained only by intermediaries, security systems, exchange points,
voluntary protocols. It is therefore subject to autonomous systems, internet service providers
evolution and political pressure. Its original creators (ISPs), registers, databases and standards bodies
engineered it to be open, that is, that its standards — some with national standing, some (often in
should be transparent, and that data and software the United States) with global reach, and others of
should be portable, extensible and interoperable. international standing — as well as some public
This Silicon Valley view was partly ideological, but bodies, some private companies and some non-
partly based on engineering principles to enable profit organizations.1 The system is truly socio-
the internet to scale as it grew. However, as the technical — we cannot hive off the technical
internet, and applications such as the Web, have from the rest. Every design decision reflects, and
become entrenched in daily life, competing views imposes (perhaps unconsciously), a balance of
about how it should be governed have begun to power, while cultural, economic and political
emerge, and to be championed at the national level, tensions play out across the collective-action
where they are playing a geopolitical role. European problems generated by digital modernity (O’Hara
nations, and the European Commission, envisage 2018). Neither computer science nor the social
a “bourgeois” internet, where trolling and bad sciences are individually sufficient to understand
behaviour are minimized and privacy protected, this immensely complex piece of technology, the
possibly at the cost of innovation. Many nations, structure of which is driven by the people who
perhaps most notably China, see an authoritarian upload content, download content and create the
internet, where technologies of surveillance links; the authors of this paper have long argued
and identification help ensure social cohesion that a dedicated “Web Science” is required both to
and security by combatting crime, terrorism, understand it and to engineer it (Berners-Lee et al.
extremism and deviance. A more commercial 2006; O’Hara et al. 2013; O’Hara and Hall 2013).
view, characteristic of the US Republicans in
Washington, DC, understands online resources as To complicate the politics, the internet grew out
private property, whose owners can monetize them, of several US initiatives, and the United States
exclude others from using them and seek market retains a disproportionate influence. However,
rates for their use. Finally, the openness of the this position, which has fostered the growth
internet is a vulnerability that can be exploited for of the internet for decades, is under pressure.
misinformation or hacking, an opportunity taken by International bodies have called for responsibility
Russia, Iran and North Korea, among others. Thus, for the internet to be transferred to more
several internets are currently co-existing uneasily. international arenas — for example, the Working
We have not, however, reached an equilibrium; Group on Internet Governance, under the auspices
we need to be prepared for the internet that of the International Telecommunication Union,
we know to evolve unpredictably, and work to recommended in a 2005 report (paras. 52, 55)
ensure that it remains beneficial for humankind. that the United States relinquish oversight of the
system, the role ideally to be performed by a UN
body. The aim of such measures is to replace the
current ad hoc, decentralized, distributed model
of internet governance with a system of greater
legitimacy; the danger, however, is that such a
system would become centralized and sclerotic,

1 As described by Laura DeNardis (2014a), to whom this paper’s authors

are indebted for many insights.

Four Internets: The Geopolitics of Digital Governance 1

 focused on government power rather than on
the inclusion of, say, civil society or industry
voices. Arguments between democratic and
The Creation and
non-democratic states, for example, are likely to
dominate such a forum, with the risk of reducing
Governance of the
it to stalemate. Accordingly, such proposals have
struggled to find support, in part because few
Internet
doubt that the United States has, on the whole,
In the context of clashing geopolitics, the internet
been a benign force on the internet and nurtured
is a gossamer arrangement. Its core is the naming
its growth as few other nations could or would.
system that gives one’s device a presence, an
As a result, many commentators, by no means all
identity, even a technical persona, on the internet
American, believe that the United States’ hands
itself. Identifiers have to be globally unique and
would be far safer than the United Nations’.
universally accepted for the internet to function as
More important than this diplomatic pressure a global space. The main identifier is the numerical
to change the system, therefore, has been the Internet Protocol (IP) address (32 bits in length
application of power by various national and in IP version 4 [IPv4], 128 bits in IPv6), which is
supranational institutions to the delicately convertible by one of a number of recognized
balanced system itself, to try to “push” the internet organizations into the familiar domain name. The
into a different type of model. This realpolitik is link between IP addresses and domain names is
having an effect, and it is clear that the internet, maintained by a hierarchically federated database.
as originally conceived by the primarily American
The DNS is extraordinarily complex, with several
white male technologists who founded it, is
tasks to be coordinated in real time and at scale in
morphing into something else. But what?
order that the essential system of unique naming
The internet has many possible futures: it could be preserved. Domain names need to be assigned,
break or collapse under these pressures, as was and to be resolvable into IP addresses via the
recently argued by Eric Schmidt, former chairman database; the database needs to be edited and
of Google and Alphabet (Kolodny 2018); it could maintained; the hierarchical naming structure
develop unequally, with few if any benefits for needs to be edited and maintained (for example,
the half of humanity that is not connected; or it authorizing new top-level domains on a par with
could flourish over a diverse set of technologies .com or .org); the servers containing this material
and geographical areas (Global Commission on need to be operated and housed; new language
Internet Governance 2016). Progress at the moment scripts beyond the Latin alphabet need to be
is equivocal. In this paper, the authors will argue authorized and integrated; disputes need to be
that four internets — at least — are emerging. resolved in a timely and legitimate fashion; and, not
They are, at present, coexisting, and may continue least, the system needs to be secured from attack.
in this way for some time. It is possible, however,
There are many other aspects to internet
that any of these internets may fall by the wayside,
governance, all equally complex, and requiring
and also that any one of them might become
intricate engineering and institutional coordination
dominant — or, indeed, that the whole intricate
across governmental and private bodies, and across
system may collapse from these pressures.
borders. The internet has a particular history, rooted
in Silicon Valley, and has been extraordinarily
successful. However, this history is contingent; it
could have been designed differently and it could
change over time. This paper will consider some
of the forces for change that are already altering
a structure that is sometimes taken for granted.

2 CIGI Papers No. 206 — December 2018 • Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall
 offers, and each becomes normative — the internet

Openness should be free, because its design frees people

to develop authentically and autonomously.

Internet governance bodies are reflexively open. The most famous statement of this philosophy
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), is John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the
which develops open internet standards, is highly Independence of Cyberspace,” which rejects
participatory and transparent. Participation any idea that cyberspace needs real-world
is not restricted by credentials, and the IETF’s institutions and remedies, arguing:
documentation and records are open and freely
available, allowing oversight and accountability. Cyberspace consists of transactions,
The IETF prefers to approve standards that do not relationships, and thought itself, arrayed
rest on intellectual property and patents; where like a standing wave in the web of
these do exist, it prefers royalty-free licensing. our communications. Ours is a world
The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, has a that is both everywhere and nowhere,
similar policy with open standards and opposition but it is not where bodies live.
to royalties, although it has a membership model
and accepts institutions of any kind as members. We are creating a world that all may
enter without privilege or prejudice
Openness of governance begets openness accorded by race, economic power,
of technology. Until relatively recently, the military force, or station of birth.
operation of the network ignored the content
of the packets of information that were routed We are creating a world where anyone,
around it. Routing algorithms applied to all anywhere may express his or her beliefs,
packets indiscriminately, and the routers had no matter how singular, without fear of
no access to the content to derive grounds for being coerced into silence or conformity.
discrimination. The headers of the packets, which
Your legal concepts of property, expression,
contain the metadata about, for example, where
identity, movement, and context do
the packets are headed, were the only things
not apply to us. They are all based on
read. In this sense, there was no interference with
matter, and there is no matter here.
the flow of information around the internet.
…The only law that all our constituent
Support for this open system is often very idealistic.
cultures would generally recognize
Yochai Benkler argues in his book The Wealth of
is the Golden Rule. (Barlow 1996)
Networks (2006, 131) that “the emergence of less
capital-dependent forms of productive social
organization [offers] the possibility that the Concerns about Openness
emergence of the networked information economy Until recently, it was assumed that this philosophy
will open up opportunities for improvement in of openness and liberty would carry all before it,
economic justice, on scales both global and local.” but many of the challenges facing authoritarian
opponents of openness 10 years ago (O’Hara 2009)
Hence, admiration of the technical brilliance of the have been overcome. Benkler’s warm approval is
internet design combines with an idealistic view of not the only possible reflection on the design of the
its affordances (what it, as an environment, offers internet, especially when we think of that design
the individual), a view which itself bifurcates. as a socio-technical construct rather than as a set
The admirer of the technology approves not only of elegant technical protocols. Most obviously,
of the speed and efficiency with which data can the very idea of openness — in trade, migration,
travel from A to B, but also more generally of capital movements and so on — is under threat
free speech, free association and other aspects across the globe following the 2008 financial
of individual liberty. The result is a libertarian crisis, and of course the open internet has been a
vision of the internet focused on its affordances, key part of globalization. Furthermore, openness
somewhat divorced from any messiness resulting does not always guarantee equitable outcomes —
from its collision with quotidian offline existence. Silicon Valley has been called “a monoculture of
On this view, the brilliant and elegant design white male nerds” in which companies founded
complements the excitement of the freedom it

Four Internets: The Geopolitics of Digital Governance 3

 by women received two percent of venture devices and the Internet of Things will extend the
capital funding in 2017 (The Economist 2018s). reach of such benign (or not so benign) governance,
facilitating interventions in, say, health care and
In particular, central to the internet’s function well-being, climate change and traffic congestion.
is that the key resources, notably the devices by
which the internet is accessed, are universal and A third response to the internet’s uniqueness is
unique. A website needs the contacting device’s not perhaps quite as obvious as privacy concerns
IP address in order to deliver the requested or the embrace of opportunity, but follows from
information to it (an IP address is regarded as reflection about the business models that the
identifying in at least some circumstances by internet has ushered in. The identity infrastructure
the Court of Justice of the European Union2). that underpins the internet is also the foundation
Other unique identifiers are also vital for the of the targeted advertising model that finances
internet’s function, including various hardware online services ranging from search to social
identifiers, cookies, real-name requirements media to email to news to user-provided content.
in social media, location information from IP This business model has driven extraordinary
addresses and mobile base stations, and the innovation online, and created high-value
identification requirements associated with ISPs. network effects in accordance with Metcalfe’s
The uniqueness upon which the system depends Law that the value of a network is proportional
tends to spark three different responses. to the square of the number of nodes. Privacy
may be a good that most people are willing
The first is a worry about privacy. The function of the to trade away, and so, on this argument, why
democratic world depends on reasonable privacy should they be prevented from so doing?
for individuals to consume news, political speech
or other cultural artefacts; to associate without Furthermore, in the current context where far more
surveillance; and to organize action. The structure information is being created and shared, there
of the internet holds out the possibility that people, may be reasons to revisit some of the assumptions
or at least their devices, can be traced, and their underlying the internet’s design. For instance, the
downloads and uploads noted and recorded. early text-based applications in the internet did not
Attempts to solve this problem by using open really cause much of a problem when packets were
standards to allow users to express their privacy indiscriminately sent hither and thither. However,
preferences, such as the Platform for Privacy when the internet is used for synchronous
Preferences3 and “Do Not Track” mechanisms,4 communication or other time-sensitive
have not caught on nearly as well as blunter applications, there are limits to acceptable levels of
instruments such as encryption standards, behind latency, and certain media, such as video, consume
which both the innocent and the guilty can shelter. scarce bandwidth. Using the market to solve issues
of latency and bandwidth implies the development
The second response, the converse to the first, of property rights to allow infrastructure owners
is to welcome an opportunity. Security and law to make managerial decisions to hold up or
enforcement loom large in the responsibilities speed up traffic, legitimizing the use of intrusive
of government, and the use of the internet as a technologies such as deep package inspection.
communication medium gives the prospect of
understanding criminal and terrorist networks This paper argues that each of these three
that threaten public security. Furthermore, the responses to the internet’s design, architecture
patterns of interaction might also help to optimize and governance underpins a particular view of
certain social functions, allowing government how it should be run, competing with the original
intervention to use the data generated to improve purist libertarian vision. Hence, there are (at least)
matters. The increasing prevalence of mobile four possible internets. Moreover, each of these
four visions has a powerful set of institutional and
ideological champions, and they can all coexist
2 Patrick Breyer v Bundesrepublik Deutschland, [2016] EUECJ C-582/14.
— hopefully, but not necessarily, peacefully.

3 Described at www.w3.org/P3P/ and now obsolete. It demanded rather a A coda: the internet requires design, standards
lot of investment from users for only equivocal gains.
and cooperative behaviour. This necessity
4 See www.w3.org/TR/tracking-dnt/; at the time of writing, this is a W3C implies one final response to the internet, a
recommendation, but it remains unclear what exactly it means when a
user asks an application not to track her.
human response that elaborate systems tend to

4 CIGI Papers No. 206 — December 2018 • Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall
invite — subversion. Plain vandalism is a possible for the information they carry, fall directly
response to the complexity and elegance of the within governments’ remit to legislate or not.
internet, and it appears in the form of deliberate
and malicious information pollution — trolling Governments, therefore, do have power to
being perhaps the most obvious manifestation. shape the internet and to reconfigure the trust
However, subversion has an aesthetic of its own, relationships on it, perhaps through what DeNardis
a hacking aesthetic that is pleased to undermine calls the “dark arts” of internet governance
the basic functions or promises of a system, often (2014a, 199–221). For example, trusting the
by using those basic functions against the system websites we access depends on the maintenance
itself. Accordingly, ideas such as fake news or the by Web browsers of lists of trusted certifying
spreading of malware — interventions that would and authenticating authorities. However, such
not be possible without the very infrastructure they lists do not solve the problem of online trust,
are there to undermine — are important parts of but rather shift it toward the authorities, which
the subversive’s arsenal. The subversive aesthetic provide economies of scale in evaluating the
also drives a global position on the internet, trustworthiness of websites, but which also
originally a dispersed and ad hoc response that create the greater systemic risk of a global rather
manifested itself as cybercrime and hacking, but than a local model of trust (O’Hara 2004). Such
which in more recent years has itself attracted a system is only as secure as the least common
institutional backers at the level of the nation state. denominator. A government could compel a
browser-trusted authority to certify an imposter
mail server, for instance, to support surveillance
of its citizens or residents in its territory (DeNardis
2014a, 95). In 2008, the Pakistani government took
down YouTube in Pakistan using the tactic of
The Geopolitics of requesting Pakistan Telecom to redirect YouTube’s
IP addresses (Hunter 2008). Routing systems
Internet Ideals were set up for a smaller and more socially
homogeneous internet, where trust, good faith
The ideals sketched above are not the only and similar aims could be assumed. Of course,
responses to the Silicon Valley ideology of the internet community responds to trust deficits
openness, but they are important in 2019 as they all with improvements in security technology,
have institutional backing at the level of the nation but any technical solution lives in some social,
state or supranational entity. Much of the internet political and economic context as part of a socio-
revolves around standards, and an accountable, technical system that is much harder to predict
open and transparent standard-setting process. or control than its technological component.
However, this does not mean that governments
are not under pressure to intervene, as either There are certain types of content that most
regulators or developers, or via procurement governments try to curb, such as child pornography
(DeNardis 2014a, 84). Many nations, at least when or pirated intellectual property. There are other
going through idealistic and optimistic periods areas, such as political discussion, Holocaust denial
(often coinciding with economic growth), have or blasphemy, where (a) only some governments
supported open standards, as, for example, India wish to intervene, and (b) typically they do not
and Brazil in recent years. However, many social agree on what to censor. However, this does not
effects of the internet, including the spread of mean that they will not try. An important means
social media, the perceived threats to individuals’ for governments to control or censor the content
(in particular, children’s) psychological well-being, distributed on the internet is to intervene in
cybercrime, cyberwarfare and a coarsening of the protocols, the systems or the technology,
public debate, have led some governments to as with the Pakistani takedown of YouTube.
step in more assertively. Above all, the perception Such censorship is not unavoidable — the “dark
that the internet is of necessity a disseminator Web” often provides technologies to circumvent
of liberal and democratic ideals has caused such interventions — but it is pretty effective in
pushback (Morozov 2011). Certain issues, such as stopping messages being disseminated through
net neutrality (see below), or the extent of liability audiences whose interest is more casual.
of content platforms or information intermediaries

Four Internets: The Geopolitics of Digital Governance 5

 These powers, however limited, mean that providers, it is less of an issue, because anyone
governments’ actions are implementing who objected to such discrimination could
different conceptions of what the internet simply switch to a provider that respected net
can be. This section reviews the four internets neutrality. As an issue, it looms largest in the
of most prominence. In addition, this United States, where competition is relatively
section considers another vision, not of the thin, and where free speech is a highly prominent
internet per se but of an important rogue shared and constitutionally enshrined value.
model for understanding the trajectory of
internet governance in 2019 and beyond. Engineers, including Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-
Lee, have tended to favour net neutrality because

Silicon Valley’s Open Internet of its positive effects on the network’s efficiency.
Other supporters, however, have been motivated
Silicon Valley’s open internet is mainly driven by by business reasons; Google, Amazon and eBay
the technology. Problems are expected to have want as much access to their popular sites as
technical solutions primarily, even if there may be possible, while companies that offer VoIP services
issues about how to implement these. For instance, (such as Microsoft, which owns Skype), and
WhatsApp is making strides in slowing down the streaming companies such as Netflix need to avoid
viral spread of fake news and dangerous rumours their content being throttled or slowed down.
with technical means (which may be easier because
it does not rely on an advertising model; see The
Economist 2018l). With respect to privacy, the most
Brussels’ Bourgeois Internet
prevalent view is to see a privacy breach as a Europe’s political attitudes differ from those of
tort (Prosser 1960), requiring the victim to show the United States, whose political and public
evidence of harm.5 This common law approach space are defined by a liberal creed. In Europe,
to privacy fits in nicely with the Silicon Valley history plays a much larger role — nation states
credo of “move fast and break things” — innovate have learned, through war, to focus on peace,
until the innovation is shown to be harmful. prosperity and cohesion. The European Union
was originally posited as an end point to these
However, not all regulation is bad, on this integrative processes, and, in cyberspace, it has
view; regulation may be needed to ensure the taken it upon itself to defend a civilized bourgeois
unfettered flow of information. Net neutrality public space against incivility, taking action, for
is a signature policy of the Silicon Valley open example, against disruptors such as Airbnb, which
internet. It is the principle that internet providers is blamed for swamping beautiful cities with
should not discriminate between different types tourists (The Economist 2018k). The European Union’s
of packets of information transmitted over the Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager
internet, to give preferential treatment to some has extended the Commission’s anti-trust work
types over others. Discrimination might happen against dominant firms, based on article 102 of
for engineering reasons (certain information- the EU treaty,6 to pursue American tech giants on
heavy and time-sensitive uses, such as video or the ground that they might swallow rivals or force
game streaming, might clog up the network), them out of business, leaving consumers with a
economic reasons (a mobile operator might poorer standard of service (The Economist 2017b).
not wish to provide the infrastructure for free
Voice over Internet Protocol [VoIP] services), or The bourgeois world rests upon virtuous behaviour,
ideological reasons (an operator might wish to civility and prudence (McCloskey 2006), and
discriminate against child pornography, say, or Western European governments by and large
the messaging of an opposition political party). attempt together with the European Union to
secure this world. Only in such an atmosphere
Net neutrality has more of an impact on the last of trust in government would it be likely that,
mile of internet delivery than on global governance. for example, Swedes would take to inserting
In countries with sufficient competition between

6 Consolidated Version of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European

5 Daniel Solove has written a series of blogs developing a theory about Union, 13 December 2007, [2012] OJ, C 326/47, art 102 (entered into
this. He argues that US courts tend only to see privacy breaches as force 26 October 2012), online: <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
harmful if they cause either physical or financial injury, and if the harm content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:12012E/TXT&from=EN>.
has already happened (ignoring risk of future harm) (Solove 2014).

6 CIGI Papers No. 206 — December 2018 • Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall
microchips in their bodies so enthusiastically (The European Union — it is a leader in data protection
Economist 2018n). European thinking on ethics because it is too large a market to ignore. It is also
and privacy focuses on dignity, whereas the totemic: “This new data protection ecosystem
American tradition looks toward liberty (Whitman stems from the strong roots of another kind of
2004), so it is not surprising to find an EU Ethics ecosystem: the European project itself, that of
Advisory Group worrying about the relationship unifying the values drawn from a shared historical
between personhood and personal data, the risks experience with a process of industrial, political,
of discrimination as a result of data processing, economic and social integration of States, in order
and the risks of undermining the foundations of to sustain peace, collaboration, social welfare and
democracy (EDPS Ethics Advisory Group 2018). economic development” (EDPS Ethics Advisory
Group 2018, 6). The jury is out; the GDPR has
European courts are regulating the internet certainly been influential worldwide. However,
increasingly aggressively. To take one prominent it may handicap Europe in the development of
example, the Court of Justice of the European artificial intelligence (AI). Where China and the
Union ruled against Google Spain in 2014 in a United States are each large centralized markets,
case brought by a man who wanted outdated enabling the gathering of giant quantities of
information about him removed from Google’s data to fuel their algorithms, Europe is more
search results.7 The original decision was a fragmented, both in terms of markets and in
compromise, and a controversial one, although terms of the dominant tech companies, and this
welcomed by many commentators, including decentralization is exacerbated by the GDPR’s
the present authors (O’Hara 2015; O’Hara and stern regulation of data sharing (China’s data
Shadbolt 2015; O’Hara, Shadbolt and Hall 2016), advantage is discussed in the next section).
as allowing the European Union to police its own
jurisdiction without imposing its own restrictive Privacy is not, of course, the only area where the
view of privacy upon the world. However, since European Union’s instinct is skeptical of market
the judgment, the French data protection regulator forces, which are sometimes perceived as too
CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique disruptive, creating social costs, and sometimes
et des Libertés) has tried to push back against perceived as producing an incoherent or inefficient
searches for EU citizens in any jurisdiction, and internet where private gain crowds out public
the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gain. A satisfactory set of arrangements is simply
of 2018 has enshrined that universalism into EU inconceivable without a regulator. For instance,
law, even switching the emphasis from delisting the European Union’s update of its copyright laws8
to erasure (Politou, Alepis and Patsakis 2018). has attracted opprobrium because of its aggressive
stance on copyright breaches (The Economist
Many suspect it will be harder to innovate in 2018u). Characteristic of the European Union’s
Brussels’ bourgeois internet, thanks to a preference attitude toward technology firms is its assumption
for incumbents and distaste for disruptive that complaints about regulation threatening
newcomers. For example, the GDPR is perceived the freewheeling, entrepreneurial internet are
as a threat to the model of free services for exaggerated. Article 13 of the new copyright
surveillance (The Economist 2018c). The GDPR is a law compels internet firms to work closely
paradigm case of the European Union’s drive to a with copyright holders to bring down copyright
bourgeois level of safety. In contrast to American materials as soon as possible, which (given the
law, it covers every kind of data processing, imprecise nature of copyright identification
whether shown to be harmful or not, and tries algorithms) is likely to result in overzealous
to anticipate and minimize risk (although it has policing. Article 11 requires aggregators to obtain
been argued that the box-ticking mentality it has a licence from publishers if they display excerpts
promoted is in practice no more protective of from content. A similar rule introduced in Spain
privacy than the tort-based approach of the United in 2014 led Google to withdraw its aggregation
States; see Bamberger and Mulligan [2015]). Yet, service from there; the bet underlying article 11
the GDPR remains a source of advantage for the is that Google could not afford to do the same

7 Google Spain SL and Google Inc v Agencia Española de Protección 8 The Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on copyright
de Datos (AEPD) and Mario Costeja González (13 May 2014), Doc in the Digital Single Market, at www.consilium.europa.eu/media/35373/
C-131/12, ECLI:EU:C:2014:317 (CJEU). st09134-en18.pdf.

Four Internets: The Geopolitics of Digital Governance 7

 across the whole of Europe. The European mindset China itself has begun to invest heavily in
is that reasonable behaviour is unlikely (if not technology using venture capital models (The
impossible) in the absence of rules: one study for Economist 2018j). Alibaba and Tencent are among
the European Union about the interconnection the largest of China’s venture capital investors and
of the internet’s autonomous systems concluded: are shaping the start-up world in that nation (The
“A recurrent theme in the discussion of IP Economist 2018p). Beyond that, Chinese companies
interconnection is whether network operators have invested billions of dollars of venture capital
will be motivated to interconnect (on reasonable in US start-ups, despite pushback from President
terms) in the absence of a regulatory obligation” Trump’s administration and the European Union
(quoted in DeNardis 2014a, 130). Meanwhile, some (The Economist 2018m; 2018q). Much of this activity
agencies are simply acting to try to influence, as, is helped by the specific ways in which Chinese
for example, the United Kingdom’s Government firms have adapted to the Chinese business
Communications Headquarters helping UK environment, which is characterized by shaky
cyber security firms (The Economist 2018o). rule of law, massive consumer scale, extremely
changeable demand, cutthroat competition and
Government, on this model, is the primary locus proximity to an efficient low-cost manufacturing
of trust. It is doubtful whether this proposition hub. Whereas US firms have developed to take
would be supported (or supportable) on any of advantage of their own more stable and business-
the other internets described in this paper. friendly environment, with high breadth of
ownership and relatively transparent management,
Beijing’s Authoritarian Internet Chinese firms are often closely associated with
China’s importance not only to the world economy, a celebrity boss/owner with majority control
but also to the internet, has grown remarkably (unlike even Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs),
in recent years, so that over half the country and display highly opportunistic behaviour,
is connected to the internet, and over half of expanding quickly into new markets (thereby
internet users are in China. Even if one is skeptical resembling the sprawling conglomerates of old)
of Robert Kaplan’s claim (2018) that the classic (The Economist 2018g). Kai-Fu Lee has argued that
geography of the Eurasian empires has returned, Chinese companies are hungrier, less complacent,
the new assertiveness of China has coincided more vigorous, more eager for competition, and
with a shift in European and Asian geopolitics, less constrained by mission statements and core
which has led to a diminution of the constraints values than their US counterparts (Lee 2018).
of behaviour on China (and also on Russia). Furthermore, according to the same author, the
age of the massive AI breakthroughs, where the
The internet, for China, has been a boon for United States has been a leader, is being superseded
surveillance. Technology, for example, is used to by an age of implementation, of applying and
monitor restive populations such as that of Xinjiang adapting the algorithms to the dull problems of
province (The Economist 2018d). Protections against everyday life. Here, China has the advantage, both
surveillance are being eroded across the globe, as in terms of the national skillset, and in terms of
the technology becomes easier to apply and people the numbers of scientists it can deploy (ibid.).
are more willing to behave in ways that make
them easy to watch, such as social networking. Another growing source of advantage for China
However, the trend is particularly strong in China. is its trove of data, the raw material of AI (ibid.).
China’s internet economy generates far more data
The Chinese model is based on the promotion of than any other, partly because of its size and partly
its own tech giants, Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba. because much Chinese commerce has moved on
These are private companies, astonishingly from cash to electronic payments. The social media
successful in their own right, but operating within app WeChat has become dominant in China, not
a tightly controlled environment in which the only for communication with friends, family and
ruling Communist Party is the dominant player. work colleagues but also for mobile payments.
However, China also has an increasing presence on Expatriate Chinese are increasingly using WeChat
international bodies; for instance, it currently holds and it has started to spread throughout the West as
the chair of the International Telecommunication a result. All the data is stored in China and therefore
Union, which is pushing for standards that will aid accessible to the Chinese government. Furthermore,
government micromanagement of the internet. unhindered by data protection regulation or

8 CIGI Papers No. 206 — December 2018 • Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall
noticeable public demand for privacy, data is Such an internet might easily be supported by
gathered from many other sources, including poorer countries for which the internet has proved
closed circuit television. This data is immensely problematic — for instance, countries including
important to Chinese science but also augmented Mauretania, Algeria, Uzbekistan, Iraq and Ethiopia
by various schemes in which Chinese citizens rate have been forced to turn the internet off during
each other as citizens on social networks. China school exam time, because of the prevalence of
hopes to lead in AI and has made advances in cheating (The Economist 2018h). While Chinese
areas such as face recognition and autonomous companies have been increasingly targeted by
vehicles. Its less-developed status helps as well, nationalists in the United States, and major US
in terms of social and industrial adaptability; firms apart from Amazon and Apple are pretty
whereas the United States is restricting the use of well barred from China, the major Chinese and
self-driving cars and worrying about pedestrian American firms compete in other markets, such
deaths (The Economist 2018b), China is building as Brazil, Indonesia, India and Africa. In January
a city to accommodate them (Lee 2018). 2019, the planet is on course to achieve a figure
of 50 percent of its population connected to the
Beyond its borders, China’s influence on American internet, but with much of the remaining 50
firms is growing. In 2018, it forced Apple to transfer percent in rural China, India and Africa. China has
its iCloud data about Chinese users to a Chinese a considerable financial influence in Africa and will
data centre (The Economist 2018r). Of course, this seek to influence the governance of the internet
kind of nationalism is common across the world, there. It may do this under the radar; while US firms
including in the European Union, but it does mean tend to transplant their usual services into the new
that the government can certainly get hold of this markets under their own names, tweaking where
valuable data more easily. Business in the lucrative necessary, Chinese firms have a somewhat more
Chinese market will have to be done on Chinese covert strategy of buying stakes in promising start-
terms. In 2010, Google quit China in order to avoid ups (as they have even in the United States before
having to censor search results. At the time of getting pushback from the Trump administration)
writing, it is reported that Google is testing a mobile — 2017 saw US$5 billion invested in Indian start-
search app called “Dragonfly,” which would filter ups by Chinese tech firms (The Economist 2018i).
websites blocked by China’s “Great Firewall,” and
provide instead a notice that some results might
have been removed. If it goes ahead, it would have
DC’s Commercial Internet
to compete with Baidu, which carries out 75 percent The characteristics of what might be called the
of searches in China, and which has cemented “DC commercial internet” — the vision of the
its dominance by ensuring that its own apps are commercial internet as espoused by leaders in the
pre-installed on Chinese smartphones (ibid.). US Capitol — are similar to those of the Silicon
Valley open internet — and indeed, commercial
In 2013, President Xi Jinping unveiled an and technology interests have always cooperated
infrastructure and trade initiative, entitled the strongly through the internet’s history, helped
Silk Road Economic Belt and the Twenty-first- by their geographical concentration in the
Century Maritime Silk Road, often called “The Belt same nation. However, the United States is now
and Road Initiative.” This aims to link together the polarized to an unprecedented degree, and the
Eurasian world with connectivity and cooperative champions of the DC model, in particular the
ventures, as a route for future Chinese (and other) Republicans, notably President Trump, are at
trade, by developing infrastructure across Asia, loggerheads (over a tremendous number of issues)
Europe and Africa. The authoritarian internet could with the champions of the Silicon Valley model,
well become part of this project, leading to a Belt, in particular the Democrats and Barack Obama,
Road and Information Superhighway Initiative, whose White House hosted a number of present
comprising the technological areas where China and former technologists. Most prominently, the
sees potential advantage, including AI, big data, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted
quantum computing and cloud storage. The city in December 2017 by three to two to repeal its
of Xi’an in Shaanxi province, a bastion of the commitment to net neutrality that it had brought
original medieval Silk Road, has already positioned in under the previous administration in 2015. The
itself as a tech centre (The Economist 2018e). Star Wars actor Mark Hamill criticized the FCC
for siding with large corporations against the

Four Internets: The Geopolitics of Digital Governance 9

 individual; Senator Ted Cruz replied that Darth expression (even ones that are privately owned,
Vader would have approved of regulating the such as telecommunications and internet
internet (The Economist 2017c). The head of the FCC, spaces), to support the societal goal of facilitating
Ajit Pai (appointed to the FCC by President Obama, expression of a multiplicity of viewpoints and,
but elevated to its chair by President Trump), conversely, restricting the rights of the owners
claims to be a supporter of net neutrality but argues of these spaces to censor or limit the messages
that federal regulation will suppress innovation, they carry. The negative interpretation is that
and that net neutrality ought to be a contractual the First Amendment forbids the state from
matter between ISPs and their customers, in their intervening in such spaces, as to do so would
terms and conditions (The Economist 2017a). restrict the free speech rights of the owners to
determine what voices are heard in their spaces;
The roots of the Silicon Valley/DC split lie in the this interpretation has been the majority view of
collective action problem that affects internet the Supreme Court since the 1980s. In short, does
operators (DeNardis 2014a). These operators the state have a positive duty to make sure speech
compete with each other for their customers, but is promoted, even on private property, or does
on the other hand, their cooperation in connecting the First Amendment’s scope only cover publicly
their networks with each other, using standard administered spaces, so that private property
protocols and handling their competitors’ traffic, owners’ rights are unaffected by it (Nunziato 2009)?
makes the internet the internet, rather than a series The positive interpretation favours net neutrality
of disconnected or weakly connected islands. This and Silicon Valley openness, while the negative
creates a tension between what we might think of interpretation (at the time of writing in the legal
as the public good of a seamless internet, and the ascendant) favours private property interests. It is
private interests of these operators. The tension a parochial argument to the rest of us, but the way
has led to much creation and innovation, but the it plays out will affect the internet as a whole.
line between the public and the private good can
shift. Silicon Valley’s open internet focuses on the There are engineering arguments for limited
public, while DC’s commercial internet leverages traffic discrimination, such as to manage the
the interests of private actors, on the argument network and to ensure that quality of service is
that large profits show that public interests are maintained for all — for example, during busy
indeed being served by these self-interested actors. periods, it might be acceptable to slow down
For example, in contrast to the European Union’s content that is not so time-critical, such as email.
approach under Commissioner Vestager (see But most arguments against net neutrality have
above), US trustbusters are more tolerant of the strong business reasons. Internet providers are
monopolistic tendencies of the industry, following the organizations that would have to obey any net
an argument of Joseph Schumpeter that the neutrality law, such as the regulations brought
promise of monopoly profits can be an important in by the FCC in 2015 under Obama, and they
driver of innovation and customer service are generally opposed, preferring not to have
(Schumpeter 2010, 76–92). Having said that, even constraints on their network management. Neo-
the Silicon Valley firms can be torn. Facebook, for liberal free-market thinkers are also opposed, not
example, is a prime builder of the walled gardens only because they generally oppose government
that Jonathan Zittrain (2008) railed against, while regulation on ideological grounds but also because
the tech giants are so keen to buy start-ups that they support free market solutions to problems
they are threatening the start-up culture for which based on freedom to exploit property rights (the
Silicon Valley is famous (The Economist 2018f; 2018t). providers are seen, on this view, as owners of
the network, and so should be free to manage
This dilemma is exacerbated by its being located them as they see fit). If anyone is treated unfairly,
in the United States, where the extent and limits then they should have recourse to a private legal
of free speech are a matter of major constitutional challenge, rather than protection via regulation,
interest. The First Amendment forbids the state so that regulation would happen “organically” via
to curb free speech, but jurisprudence has led common law. We see here a clash between two
to divergent interpretations. The affirmative types of liberty supported under liberalism, as
interpretation, which held sway during much described by Isaiah Berlin (2002): “freedom from”
of the twentieth century, holds that the state (in this case, censorship) versus “freedom to” (in
is justified in intervening in public spaces for

10 CIGI Papers No. 206 — December 2018 • Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall
this case, manage one’s private property, that is, Addendum: Moscow’s
the internet infrastructure owned by providers).
Spoiler Model
More widely, this property-based model threatens As noted above, geopolitical shifts have led to
the interoperability that was a fundamental a lessening of the constraints on Russia and a
principle of the internet and, subsequently, the reassertion of the imperial geography of the past
Web — Berners-Lee in his 2018 Turing Lecture9 (Kaplan 2018). Russia under President Vladimir
argued that the universality of identifiers for Putin has exploited this to engineer an ideological
online resources was key for the added value space opposed to the West, based on a mystical
of the Web. As early as 2008, Zittrain sounded mélange of nationalism and destiny, ressentiment
an alarm about what he called non-generative and victimhood, power and calculation, cynicism
models of the internet, which created walled and conspiracy theories (Snyder 2018). Given
gardens and undermined innovation (Zittrain this vision, the decentralized internet, with no
2008). Since Zittrain wrote, the extraordinary institutionalized editing or fact-checking, has been
growth of social networking has built the walls an ally. Indeed, the polarization of politics in the
around the gardens still higher, while arguably West, notably in the United States but also in the
making the gardens prettier and more habitable. European Union, has provided the opportunity
to import the uncertainties and obfuscations
In particular, social networking sites (SNSs) bypass routine in Russian politics into Western politics,
some of the internet’s interoperability mechanisms. by cheaply importing narratives, arguments
They do not particularly support cross-platform and conspiracies using the power of bots. Much
compatibility (so that interacting between two of this has been revealed by Robert Mueller’s
SNSs is not as simple as, say, sending an email inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 US
from Gmail to an .edu address). Personal data is presidential election (The Economist 2018a).
not portable between sites, although the GDPR
is attempting to change this. Search is restricted. There are several other instances of this, which
Resources are not identified or located by universal appear strategically inexplicable except as a means
formalisms (DeNardis 2014b). As Berners-Lee of sowing division and mistrust. For instance, David
wrote in 2010, “connections among data exist only A. Broniatowski et al. (2018) report that Russian
within a site. So the more you enter, the more you bots and trolls regularly tweet about vaccination in
become locked in. Your [SNS] becomes…a closed divisive terms, linking the issues to controversies
silo of content…The more this kind of architecture in American politics. The tweets are both pro- and
gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes anti-vaccination, but the purpose appears to be less
fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, to establish a position as to create, by the volume
universal information space” (quoted in DeNardis of tweets, the impression of strong and partisan
2014a, 241). Zittrain and Berners-Lee defend the debate, and to recruit partisan campaigners by
Silicon Valley open internet, but the DC commercial associating vaccination with the several other
response is that SNSs provide services that people wedge issues in America’s dysfunctional politics.
actually wish to access, in large numbers, and
that the only responsibilities SNS owners have This is not just a Russian tactic (although the term
are to their customers, assuming that they do not “disinformation” was indeed originally a Russian
interfere with the running of the internet as a term, coined during the Stalin era). No doubt
whole. As with other types of property, if someone all nations indulge in deliberately propagating
wishes to build a wall around their garden, they falsehood. However, disinformation is a particularly
should be allowed to do so as long as they cause no potent weapon against the West, where speech is
harms elsewhere. They should be the best judge of freer (and it is easier to spread ideas), and where
the value to be obtained from their property. The controlling the public sphere is seen as rather alien.
single, universal information space that Berners- A recent report from the Oxford Internet Institute
Lee advocates cannot and should not be imposed, argued that “computational propaganda is now
on this view, against the will of someone to one of the most powerful tools against democracy”
monetize their intellectual property via restriction. (Woolley and Howard 2017, 7) and found evidence
that, for instance, 45 percent of Twitter activity
in Russia was automated for the creation of
disinformation (ibid., 4), and that political debate in
9 See https://amturing.acm.org/vp/berners-lee_8087960.cfm. Germany, the United States, Poland, Brazil, Ukraine

Four Internets: The Geopolitics of Digital Governance 11

 and Taiwan is also compromised (ibid.). In August although the Russians and others are happy to troll
2018, Facebook and Twitter shut down hundreds of the internet, they do require a functioning internet
accounts accused of spreading disinformation not to troll, so they have no incentive to undermine it
only from Russia, but also from Iran (Timberg 2018). totally (both the honest and the dishonest benefit
from general honesty; compare Nyberg 1997;
Iñiguez et al. 2014). However, the acceptability
of dishonesty is likely to increase if the system
as a whole is perceived as unfair, providing

Discussion: Four Internets

spoilers with incentives to highlight lapses in the
standards of other nations with accusations of

and a Free Rider

hypocrisy (compare, for example, Zhang 2008).

Similarly, the Chinese authoritarian model appeals

These five visions of the internet do not, and to its government, which is quick to close down
probably could not, exist in their pure forms, still conversation in its lively microblogging media.
less be so neatly ascribed to particular regimes. However, it also values the openness that leads
They are caricatured here to make the main points: to the publication of dissent, which it uses as
the homogeneity of the internet cannot be assumed an early warning of problems with illegal land
(Global Commission on Internet Governance 2016), appropriations, pollution, corruption, poor food
and scenarios about what is sometimes called its and air quality, and other issues. Conversely,
Balkanization (creating “the Splinternet”) cannot the authoritarian internet will appeal to any
be ruled out. Neither are these the only internets government, however democratic, that takes
that could evolve — the four (plus one) could responsibility for social problems (such as obesity
become five, or six, or seven or more. There could or climate change) and would rather impose a
be a developing world internet, or a feminist paternalistic solution than allow one to emerge
internet, or an Islamic internet, or a caring internet, from an autonomous citizenry; the kind of soft
or an internet of cyborgs, if the appropriate paternalism known as the “nudge” philosophy
ethical vision found a technological realization is one means of leveraging large quantities of
and sufficiently powerful institutional backing. data within an internet environment in which
choices are carefully closed down (Thaler and
Many commentators have drawn the conclusion Sunstein 2008). India, for example, eschews the
that this is a straight fight between China and full Chinese authoritarian suite, but nevertheless
the United States.10 This notion underestimates has access to large quantities of social media and
the breadth of dispute between conflicting banking data that are highly linkable through
visions (not least within the United States its Aadhaar digital biometric identity scheme.
itself). However, it is important to understand
as well that these models do (at the moment) In the United States, as emphasized above, the
coexist in uneasy tension, and that (so far) all are breakdown of political consensus has made the
perceived to have some value by most actors. distinction between the Silicon Valley open internet
and the DC commercial internet far sharper than it
Russia is singled out as the spoiler, free riding traditionally has been (one of the last acts in office
on the efforts of others to produce a valuable of President Trump’s former Attorney General Jeff
information space. Of course, very many Sessions was to sue the State of California for its
nations, including the United States, indulge in decision to restore net neutrality regulation against
disinformation. The actions of the United States the FCC’s own reversal [The Guardian 2018]), but
(under both Obama and Trump) in indicting cyber until fairly recently the two visions managed to rub
spies and cyber warriors from China, Russia, Iran along reasonably well, with businesses switching
and elsewhere have reportedly concerned members their evangelizing between openness and property/
of its National Security Agency, who themselves markets opportunistically as their situations
fear being prosecuted outside the United States for demanded. Meanwhile, some of the tech giants
similar crimes (The Economist 2018v). Meanwhile, are recruiting prominent European politicians to
explain their positions to fellow Eurocrats, such
as Facebook’s appointment of the former leader of
10 For example, Eric Schmidt (quoted in Kolodny 2018) and Lee, in his book Britain’s Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, as its head
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order (2018).

12 CIGI Papers No. 206 — December 2018 • Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall
of global affairs (Clegg 2018). Such cross-fertilization
may also result in bringing the Eurocrats closer to
the Americans; Margrethe Vestager’s decision in
Conclusion
2017 to order Apple to pay back-taxes to the Irish
In 2002, when the world seemed unipolar under
government (that did not want the money) was
a benign if stern American hegemony, and the
criticized by one of her predecessors, Neelie Kroes,
recent terrorist attacks in New York had created an
who had been appointed to Uber’s Public Policy
imperative to reassert American moral ascendency,
Advisory Board in 2016 (The Economist 2017b).
President George W. Bush described an “Axis
Even Tim Berners-Lee, a consistent apostle of of Evil.” In today’s very different world, we can
openness, has a vision of the Web that looks much discern a somewhat scarier “Axis of Incivility,”
closer to Brussels’ bourgeois internet than Silicon of nation states jostling for narrow advantage,
Valley’s open one, in which polite conversation is with a view of international relations, including
not drowned out by the roughhouse — consistent economic relations, as zero sum. Unlike the Axis of
with the Web’s birth as a means of disseminating Evil, which reflected US foreign policy concerns,
scientific research (Berners-Lee 2018). The initiatives the Axis of Incivility has at its foundations the
he has championed — ranging from the Web three major superpowers, the United States, China
We Want,11 a project of the World Wide Web and Russia, each of which in its different ways at
Foundation, to a “Magna Carta for the Web” (Kiss the time of writing pursues aggressive nationalist
2014; Sample 2018), to the Solid platform, which is policy goals while showing impatience with
intended to “re-decentralize” the Web guided by due process both internally and internationally.
the principle of “personal empowerment through Many other nations, including Egypt, Hungary,
data”12 — aim to promote human rights, privacy, India, Iran, Israel, the Philippines, Poland, Saudi
anti-discrimination and trolling, and bear a closer Arabia and Turkey, are following this lead.
resemblance to the European Commission’s vision
In such a world, it is inconceivable that these
than to John Perry Barlow’s. The Solid vision sees
competing visions of the internet will not
individuals curating their own data responsibly
become entangled in the drive for international
and managing read/write permissions via “PODs”
recognition, power and coalition-building.
— personal online data stores — thereby meeting
Neither the benefits of cooperation and openness,
one of Berners-Lee’s own worries about the Web
nor those of privacy and bourgeois stability,
(that we have lost control of our personal data), but
are likely to cut much ice with rational actors
maybe not dealing with some of the by-products of
with such a mindset. Hence, the competition
openness, specifically the spread of misinformation
to establish which, if any, of the four internets
and the lack of transparency (Berners-Lee 2017).
will prevail (however temporarily) is likely to be
The Global Commission on Internet Governance
strong, and not always focused on win-wins.
(2016) adopts a similar position of combining
openness with a respectful environment.

Hence these models (and the spoilers that

undermine them) are likely to coexist even within
individual organizations and governments.
Nevertheless, clear preferences exist for
certain models, and these contribute to the
tensions in global internet governance.

11 See https://webwewant.org/.

12 See https://solid.mit.edu/.

Four Internets: The Geopolitics of Digital Governance 13

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16 CIGI Papers No. 206 — December 2018 • Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall
About CIGI
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