Debate Growing Whether Internet Fragmenting

As governments increasingly seek to control aspects of the internet, debate is growing over what they're trying to achieve. Some argue countries such as China and Russia aim for a technical break from the global domain name system (DNS). Others said nations are seeking to align the internet with their jurisdictional boundaries. The issues came up in recent academic writings and a Nov. 27 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) session.

There's "tension at the national level to try to protect citizens from various kinds of harm, and there is a desire to impose where's it's possible to do so, a set of policies that achieve that protection," said Google Chief Evangelist Vinton Cerf at IGF. The question is whether that group of policies can be made interoperable, in the way the original internet networks were made compatible. "The original internet version of a transnational space with end-to-end exchange of packets among willing endpoints is being now treated to the wonders of a vertically segmented pattern of political authority in which states seek to sort of divide the internet into mutually exclusive sorts of territorial-based domains," said Milton Mueller, Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy professor.

Physical infrastructures "have proven to be among the easiest elements over which governments can exercise control," American Enterprise Institute Adjunct Scholar Bronwyn Howell blogged Friday. That's shown by the debate about deployment of Huawei in 5G networks. Battle lines have been drawn between national and international allegiances for control of data, she wrote. Fragmentation is being facilitated by countries placing other location-specific obligations on applications providers that don't apply elsewhere, such as the Australian and Singaporean laws outlawing the sharing of "abhorrent violent materials" online, Howell said.

Forces are pushing the internet toward fragmentation, blogged InterWorking Labs Chief Technology Officer in 2016. He's still of that opinion, he emailed now. "The glue that holds the net together has changed its character." That was the principle that IP version 4 or IPv6 packets should be able "to flow, unvexed, from any source IP address to any destination IP address." Now, protocols underlying the world of apps have been engineered to work through relaying translators and proxies, allowing construction of a chain of transmission control protocol connections through them, "which is exactly the kind of situation that opens the door to the island-and-bridge world that I envision."

The Russian government "is well-known for its perpetual claims about dividing the Internet into 'national segments' so that it can try to impose the logic of sovereignty on them," Internet Governance Project Visiting Scholar Ilona Stadnik noted in February. Competing views about how the internet should be governed "have begun to emerge, and to be championed at the national level, where they are playing a geopolitical role," wrote University of Southampton, U.K., electronics and computer science associate professor Kieron O'Hara and computer science professor Wendy Hall in a December 2018 paper.