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Russia is the latest country to try to find ways to police its online borders,
sparking the end of the internet as we know it.
In 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, ending 30 years of war across
Europe and bringing about the sovereignty of states. The rights of states to
control and defend their own territory became the core foundation of our global
political order, and it has remained unchallenged since.
In 2010, a delegation of countries including Syria and Russia came to an
obscure agency of the United Nations with a strange request: to inscribe those
same sovereign borders onto the digital world. They wanted to allow countries
to assign internet addresses on a country by country basis, the way country
codes were originally assigned for phone numbers, says Hascall Sharp, an
independent internet policy consultant who at the time was director of
technology policy at technology giant Cisco.
After a year of negotiating, the request came to nothing: creating such
boundaries would have allowed nations to exert tight controls over their own
citizens, contravening the open spirit of the internet as a borderless space
free from the dictates of any individual government.
Nearly a decade on, that borderless spirit seems like a quaint memory. The
nations who left the UN empty-handed had not been disabused of the notion that
you could put a wall around your corner of cyberspace. They ve simply spent the
past decade pursuing better ways to make it happen.
Indeed, Russia is already exploring a novel approach to creating a digital
border wall, and last month it passed two bills that mandate technological and
legal steps to isolate the Russian internet. It is one of a growing number of
countries that has had enough of the Western-built, Western-controlled internet
backbone. And while Russia s efforts are hardly the first attempt to secure
exactly what information can and can t enter a country, its approach is a
fundamental departure from past efforts.
This is different, says Robert Morgus, a senior cybersecurity analyst at the
New America Foundation. Russia s ambitions are to go further than anyone with
the possible exceptions of North Korea and Iran in fracturing the global
internet.
Russia s approach is a glimpse into the future of internet sovereignty. Today,
the countries pursuing digital Westphalianism are no longer just the usual
authoritarian suspects, and they are doing so at deeper levels than ever
before. Their project is aided as much by advances in technology as by growing
global misgivings about whether the open internet was ever such a good idea to
start with. The new methods raise the possibility not only of countries pulling
up their own drawbridges, but of alliances between like-minded countries
building on these architectures to establish a parallel internet.
What s wrong with the open internet?
It s well known that some countries are unhappy with the Western coalition that
has traditionally held sway over internet governance. It s not just the
philosophies espoused by the West that troubles them, but the way those
philosophies were baked into the very architecture of the internet, which is
rather famously engineered to ensure no one can prevent anyone from sending
anything to anyone.
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That s thanks to the baseline protocol the 2010 delegation were trying to work
around: TCP/IP (transfer control protocol/internet protocol) allows information
to flow with absolutely no regard for geography or content. It doesn t care
what information is being sent, what country it s coming from, or the laws in
the country receiving it; all it cares about is the internet address at either
end of the transaction. Which is why, instead of sending data across
predetermined paths, which might be diverted or cut off, TCP/IP will get
packets of information from point A to point B by any means necessary.
It s easy to dismiss objections to this setup as the dying cries of
authoritarian regimes in the face of a global democratising force but the
problems that arise don t just affect authoritarian regimes. Any government
might be worried about malicious information like malware reaching military
installations and critical water and power grids, or fake news influencing the
electorate.
Russia and China were just earlier than others in understanding the potential
impact that a massively open information ecosystem would have on humans and
human decision-making, especially at the political level, says Morgus. Their
view was that a country s citizens are just as much a part of the critical
infrastructure as power plants, and they need to be protected from malicious
information targeting them in this case fake news rather than viruses. But
this is not about protecting citizens as much as controlling them, says Lincoln
Pigman, a Russia scholar at the University of Oxford and a research fellow at
the Foreign Policy Centre think tank in London.
A sovereign internet is not a separate internet
Russia and China started talking publicly about the sovereign internet around
2011 or 2012, as Russia s two-year winter of protest was beginning to take
hold, and as internet-borne revolutions rocked other authoritarian regimes.
Convinced that these revolts had been stirred up by Western states, Russia
sought to stop disruptive influences from reaching their citizens essentially
creating checks at its digital borders.
But internet sovereignty is not as simple as cutting yourself off from the
global internet. That may seem counterintuitive, but to illustrate how
self-defeating such a move would be, one need look no further than North Korea.
A single cable connects the country to the rest of the global internet. You can
disconnect it with the flip of a switch. But few countries would consider
implementing a similar infrastructure. From a hardware perspective alone, it s
close to impossible.
In countries with rich and diverse connectivity to the rest of the internet,
it would be virtually impossible to identify all the ingress and egress points,
says Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin at
Madison, who maps the network of physical pipes and cables through which the
global internet runs. Even if Russia could somehow find all the hardware by
which information travels into and out of the country, it wouldn t serve them
very well to close these faucets, unless they are also happy to be separated
from the world economy. The internet is now a vital part of global commerce,
and Russia can t disconnect itself from this system without mangling its
economy.
The trick, it would seem, is to keep some types of information flowing freely
while impeding others. But how can this sort of internet sovereignty possibly
work, given TCP/IP s notorious agnosticism?
The leader in separating problematic from authorised internet content has
traditionally been China. Its Golden Shield, otherwise known as the Great
Firewall of China, famously employs filters to selectively block certain
internet addresses, certain words, certain IP addresses and so on. This
solution is by no means perfect: it s software-based, meaning that programmers
can design further software to circumvent it. Virtual Private Networks and
censorship avoidance software like Tor get around it.
More to the point, the Chinese system won t work for Russia. For one thing, it
relies heavily on the big Chinese platforms taking the content down , says Adam
Segal, a cybersecurity expert with US think tank, the Council on Foreign
Relations, whereas Russia is more reliant on US social media companies .
Much of China s advantage also comes down to the physical pipes its internet is
built on. China, suspicious of the new Western technology from the get-go, only
permitted very few entry and exit points to be built from the global internet
into its borders, whereas Russia was initially quite welcoming of the internet
boom and is now consequently riddled with interconnects. China simply has fewer
digital borders to keep an eye on.
So, Russia can t afford to turn itself into a corporate internet. And it can t
replicate China s approach. Russia is therefore working on a hybrid method that
neither relies entirely on hardware nor on software instead messing with the
set of processes and protocols that determine whether internet traffic can move
from its origin to its intended destination. Internet protocols specify how all
information must be addressed by your computer, in order to be transmitted and
routed across the global wires; it s a bit like how a Windows machine knows it
can t boot up an Apple operating system. This is not one specific thing. In
effect a protocol is a combination of different things like data, an
algorithm, IP address across different layers, says Dominique Lazanski, who
works on international internet governance and consults on standards
development.
One of the most fundamental of these is the DNS standard the address book
that tells the internet how to translate an IP address, for example
38.160.150.31, into a human-legible internet address like bbc.co.uk, and points
the way to the server that houses that IP location.
It s DNS that Russia has been setting its sights on. At the beginning of April,
the country was supposed to test a new method of isolating the entire country s
internet traffic so that citizen internet traffic would only stay within the
country s geographical boundaries instead of bouncing around the world. The
plan which was met with skepticism from much of the engineering community, if
not dismissed outright was to create a Russia-only copy of the DNS servers
(the internet s address book, currently headquartered in California) so that
citizens traffic would be exclusively directed to Russian sites, or Russian
versions of external sites. It would send Russian internet users to Yandex if
they typed in Google, or the social network VK instead of Facebook.
To lay the groundwork for this, Russia spent years enacting laws that force
international companies to store all Russian citizens data inside the country
leading some companies such as LinkedIn to be blocked when they refused to
comply.
If Russia succeeds in its ultimate plans for a national DNS, there wouldn t be
any need for filtering out international information. Russian internet traffic
would just never need to leave the country, says Morgus. That means that the
only stuff that Russians or anyone would be able to access from inside
Russia is information that's hosted inside Russia, on servers physically in the
country. That would also mean no one can access external information, whether
that is their external cash or whether it's Amazon to buy that scarf.
Most experts acknowledge that Russia s primary goal in doing this is to
increase its control over its own citizens. But the action may have global
consequences too.
The approaches taken by Russia and China are too expensive for smaller
countries to emulate, but that doesn t mean they won t be influential. The
spread particularly of repressive policies or illiberal internet architecture
is like a game of copycat, says Morgus. His observation is borne out by
research done by Jaclyn Kerr at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Authoritarian adoption of digital solutions that shape the extent and type of
Internet control they exert, she finds, is likely driven by three variables.
The first is just what s available out there. The second is whether the regime
can afford to implement any of the available options. The third variable the
policies selected by the states in the regime s reference group is a kind of
keeping up with the Joneses that explains why it has been described as a game
of copycat: what policies have its buddies endorsed or chosen? This often
hinges on the attitude of the regime; are its friends open or illiberal when it
comes to internet control?
Regarding the first variable, Russia's neighbours, like the Central Asian
Republics, could certainly leverage Russia's architecture like the Russian
DNS to connect only to the RUnet version of the internet. This would
essentially expand the proposed borders of the RUnet to their periphery, says
Morgus.
The digital deciders
As regards the third variable, the list of countries that find themselves
attracted to more authoritarian internet governance seems to be growing. Not
all countries fall neatly into one or the other of the open internet and
authoritarian repressive peer groups when it comes to how they treat their
countries internet. Israel for example, lies neatly between the two extremes,
as Morgus and his colleagues Jocelyn Woolbright and Justin Sherman pointed out
in a paper published last year. They found that over the past four years,
digital decider states Israel, Singapore, Brazil, Ukraine, and India among
others have drifted increasingly toward a more sovereign and closed approach
to information. The reasons for their drift are varied, but several of these
countries are in similar situations: Ukraine, Israel, and South Korea, which
exist in a perpetual state of conflict, have found their adversaries
weaponising the internet against them. Some experts find that the strategic use
of the internet in particular social media has become like war. Even South
Korea despite its reputation as open and global has developed a
groundbreaking technique to crack down on illegal information online.
But can the deciders really copy China or Russia s model? China s technological
means to sovereignty is too idiosyncratic for smaller countries to follow;
Russia s is not yet fully tested. Both cost a minimum of hundreds of millions
to set up.
Two of the largest digital decider countries, Brazil and India, have long
sought a way to deal with the global internet that relies neither on the open
values of the West nor on closed national intranets. Their internet and
political values sit very much in the middle of the spectrum, says Morgus. For
the better part of the last decade, both have tried to come up with a viable
alternative to the two opposing versions of the internet we see today.
That innovation was hinted at in 2017, when the Russian propaganda site RT
reported that Brazil and India would team up with Russia, China and South
Africa, to develop an alternative they referred to as the BRICS Internet.
Russia claimed it was creating the infrastructure to shield them from external
influence .
The plan fell through. Both Russia and China were interested in pursuing
BRICS, but the rest were less enthusiastic, says Lazanski. Brazil s change in
leadership in particular derailed it.
Belt Road Initiative
Some see the groundwork being laid for a second try in the guise of China s
Belt and Road Initiative, China s 21st Century silk road project to connect
Asia to Europe and Africa by building a vast network of overland corridors,
shipping lanes and telecommunications infrastructure in countries like
Tajikistan, Djibouti and Zimbabwe. According to estimates from the
International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, China is now engaged
in some 80 telecommunications projects around the world from laying cables to
building core networks in other countries, contributing to a significant and
growing Chinese-owned global network.
There could be a very significant infrastructure element to these plans, says
Sim Tack, an analyst formerly with Jane s who now works with the intelligence
group Stratfor. One possibility is a scenario where enough of these countries
join Russia and China to develop a similar infrastructure to a point where they
could sustain each other economically without doing business with the rest of
the world, meaning they could shut themselves off the Western internet. Smaller
countries might prefer an internet built around a non-Western standard, and an
economic infrastructure built around China might be the third way that allows
countries to participate in a semi-global economy while being able to control
certain aspects of their populations internet experience. Tack, however,
argues that such a self-sustainable walled off internet economy, while
possible, is also extremely unlikely.
Maria Farrell of the internet freedom campaign organisation Open Rights Group
doesn t think it s too far-fetched, though the separate internet may take a
slightly different form. The Belt and Road Initiative, she says, offers a
plug-and-play internet that gives decider countries, for the first time, an
option for getting online that does not depend on the Western internet
infrastructure.
What China has done is put together a whole suite of not just technology, but
information systems, censorship training, and model laws for surveillance, she
says. It s the full kit, and the laws, and the training, to execute a Chinese
version of the internet. It s cheap. And it s being sold as a credible
alternative to a Western internet that increasingly feels open in name only.
Nations like Zimbabwe and Djibouti, and Uganda, they don t want to join an
internet that s just a gateway for Google and Facebook to colonise their
digital spaces, she says. Neither do these countries want to welcome this
openness offered by the Western internet only to see their governments
undermined by espionage. Along with every other expert interviewed for this
article, Farrell reiterated how unwise it would be underestimate the ongoing
reverberations of the Snowden revelations especially the extent to which they
undermined the decider countries trust in the open web.
The poorer countries especially, that scared the bejesus out of them, she
says. It showed what we had all suspected was actually true.
Just as Russia is working to reinvent DNS, the Belt and Road Initiative s
plug-and-play authoritarian internet gives countries that sign up access to
China s [bespoke] internet protocols. TCP/IP is not a static standard, points
out David Conrad, chief technology officer of the International Corporation of
Assigned Names and Numbers, which issues and oversees major domain names, and
runs DNS. It is always evolving. Nothing on the internet is unchanging.
But their evolution is careful and slow and based on global consensus on a
single internet. If that were to change, TCP/IP might well bifurcate, says
Morgus. For well over a decade, China and Russia have been pushing the internet
community to nudge the protocol toward greater identifiability, adds Farrell, a
development that won t surprise anyone familiar with its mass adoption of face
recognition for tracking its citizens in the physical world.
Western contagion
But maybe the authoritarian countries have less of a job to do than they
thought.
More and more Western countries are being forced to think about what that
means, sovereignty on the internet, says Tack. In the wake of recent election
meddling, and the well-documented practice by Russian governments to sow
discord on Western social media, Western policymakers woke up to the idea that
an open and free internet could actually harm democracy itself, Morgus says.
The parallel rise of populism in the United States and elsewhere, coupled with
concerns about the collapse of liberal international order, saw many of the
traditional open internet sword-bearers retreat into their shells.
It s not about bad countries and good countries it s about any country that
wants to suppress communications, says Milton Mueller, who runs the Internet
Governance Project at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta. The worst thing I ve
seen lately is the British online harms bill. This white paper proposes the
creation of an independent regulator, tasked with establishing good practices
for internet platforms to follow and punishments to mete out if they don t.
These good practices limit the kind of information that would be familiar to
anyone keeping up with recent Russian internet laws: revenge porn, hate crimes,
harassment and trolling, content uploaded by prisoners, and disinformation.
Indeed, the very multinationals that decider countries fear today might be
eager to be enlisted to help them meet their goals of information sovereignty.
Facebook has recently capitulated to growing pressure by calling for government
regulation to determine, among other things, what constitutes harmful content:
hate speech, terrorist propaganda and more . Google is rather famously working
to have its cake and eat it too, by providing an open internet in the West
(which it may open to Western governments every now and again) and a censored
search engine in the East. I suspect there will always be a tension between
desires to limit communication but not limit the benefits that communication
can bring, says Conrad.
A separate internet for some, Facebook-mediated sovereignty for others: whether
the information borders are drawn up by individual countries, coalitions, or
global internet platforms, one thing is clear the open internet that its
early creators dreamed of is already gone.
The internet hasn t been one globally connected thing in a long time, says
Lazanski.
--
Sally Adee is a freelance science and technology writer. She blogs at the
science writing collective The Last Word on Nothing.