Has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dealt the death blow to a global internet?
Given that we seem to heading toward a world in which a growing number of governments are effectively creating their own, national, internets and isolating their people from the rest of the World Wide Web, it’s worth charting the march of a global digital network initially conceived as a way to interconnect the entire planet, one that begin in the United States — the reason why English is still its main language — but has since been interrupted by China’s Great Firewall, since imitated by countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and North Korea, and finally, now joined by Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.
It’s all-to-clear to a business school professor with a historical perspective: increasingly, the citizens of countries like China have been isolated from the rest of the world in terms of the information they access or their perception of what the rest of the planet is doing, which results in an increasing difficulty for the West to understand the vision of China vis-à-vis the rest of the world, and vice versa.
In Iran, a country with a middle class used to accessing international media and reasonably representative in the country’s cities, the halal internet proposed by its government has had less impact, but has nevertheless increased the sense of isolation, as is also the case…
