Russia’s departure from the Internet marks the beginning of the age of the Splinternet.
The disconnection of key countries from the global network inevitably harms the global economy, jeopardizing property freedom and freedom of expression. We recognize alarming shifts in the WWW tectonic plates and fear the next step.
The Internet is built decentralized, but what happens when one country decides to disconnect itself from the network? Is it possible that instead of the existing global Internet, there will be several regional or national networks that do not talk to each other and are not even based on the same technology? Yes. You may. This is what has been happening since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Russia, fearing the harsh images from the battlefield, has decided to block the Internet. For example, the Russian authorities do their best to prevent access to Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, Facebook, and even Israeli sites such as the “Vesti” site in the Russian language and the Channel 9 site.
But is it even possible? Take, for example, a situation where the database server of a leading Russian news site is hossted within the geographical boundaries of another country. In this situation, blocking access to the database will shut down the local news site. Russia uses global technology services — code, server farms, DNS servers, and it is not a closed technological economy. Blocking the Internet will inevitably halt internal processes within Russia — whether in software development or the operation of companies, logistics, and more. Russia needs to build the entire Internet from scratch to disconnect from the Internet.
And not that it was never done. In China, for example, the country has from the beginning established massive technology infrastructures with dedicated applications for the country only, such as WeChat, which is a replacement for WhatsApp, the social network Weibo, and local cloud companies like Tencent, which allows storage and backup without relying on global cloud services. Although Russia has recently launched a Russian alternative to Instagram called Rosgram, in the short term, the country does not have the technological power — in services, hardware, and code — to build itself a closed Internet like in China. It can only try to block the Internet — which will mainly lead to dysfunction and damage to communication between businesses and customers.
These moves lead to fears about the birth of the Splinternet (an Internet split), an era in which Chinese isolation will become a role model, and states leaders will decide to establish national networks that don’t communicate with the national networks of other countries. This is a genuine concern for the technology and its development capability. Today, global protocols are synchronized and allow computers worldwide to communicate with each other easily. The development of the Splinternet will also change technology so that computers that could previously share information, knowledge, and computing power will have to operate separately — which will create increasing difficulties in communication between them.
The above is a fundamental concern for the global economy and technological development, but it is a minor problem. The Internet has proven to be the fastest tool for transmitting information, and therefore blocking it will harm freedom, including freedom of expression, privacy, and property rights. The bad news in countries’ attempts to isolate the Internet from the world is not just the economy but democracy in general and the freedom of the world’s citizens in particular.
