China, our crystal ball
WeChat, one of the most popular messaging services in China, has decided to block Uber accounts because Tencent, its owner, is one of the main investors in Didi Kuaidi, the company created out of the merger of two firms that offer an identical service to Uber, and that claims to have an 83 percent share of the taxi market in China.
The measure, which follows a similar move in March that Uber described as a bid to thwart competition, is an arbitrary attempt to close down a rival as part of a trade war; what’s more, it’s not the first time this has happened: electronic retail site Taobao, owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba, blocked WeChat visits in 2013, which resulted in Tencent blocking Xiami Music, a streaming service Alibaba had bought recently. Alibaba’s Alipay payment service was also blocked, by JD.com, another leading e-commerce site, also owned by Tencent.
These kinds of hit-and-run attacks are the very opposite of an open internet, an internet that has triumphed because it is neutral, because it provides information and takes information from one place to another regardless of who sends or receives it. Obviously, the idea of an open internet in China, whose government runs the biggest and most restrictive firewall in the world to block anything it doesn’t like, make little sense, and what’s worse, the majority of Chinese themselves do not seem worried.
But the real problem here isn’t the Great Firewall of China or the no-holds-barred approach to dealing with competition of its internet giants. The real problem here is that increasingly we can see that China is not some aberration, but a trendsetter. When we look at what is going on in China today, we are seeing our own future. We are evolving toward a more restricted and closed internet, one where our access to certain services will depend on the company that provides that access, and who it has done deals with.
Just a few years ago, such blocking systems were the sole preserve of dictatorships like China or North Korea. But we now see these same systems being set up by more and more government to prevent their citizens from accessing certain content, whether on the basis of protecting children, trade, copyright, and territorial restrictions.
If you are reading this in Germany, you may already know that there is any number of videos you can’t see on YouTube. If you try to enter some adult sites while in the United Kingdom, or The Pirate Bay in many, many others, you can’t, because your internet provider has been forced by the government to take part in a scheme that sounds suspiciously like those we used to criticize in China. In the United Kingdom, the internet is officially censored.
The Turkish authorities constant blocking of YouTube, Twitter, and other services is now almost constant, either because some videos supposedly insult Kemal Atatürk, the so-called father of the nation, or because they accuse the prime minister of corruption. The European Court of Human Rights’ ruling that these blocks were illegal doesn’t seem to have had much impact. At the same time, the recent raft of measures approved by the European Parliament, which de facto ends internet neutrality and means that we will increasingly discover that our internet provider will be able to prevent us from seeing certain services that compete with its own, and that we won’t be able to open certain pages.
Whether for commercial reasons, government restrictions, or other interests, it is clear that we are moving further and further away from what the internet once was: an open network where bits circulated freely and we could access any information we wanted. We now have idiots like Donald Trump calling on Bill Gates to “close the internet”, and we think it’s funny. But in the not-too-distant future, scenarios like China’s, where pages are blocked by this or that provider will be the norm. Sadly, we will also see this as normal.
The unhappy truth is that we are gradually turning into China, and if we want to see our glum future, we need only look into the crystal ball it provides. Pessimistic? Undoubtedly, but I’m afraid that this is all very real.
(En español, aquí)
