Exponential by Azeem Azhar

Author:Azeem Azhar [Azhar, Azeem]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473578852
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

Barlow was not alone in thinking that the internet transcends national boundaries. It represents one of the most important symbols of globalisation. The web passes across borders like a pulmonary system carrying the oxygen of globalisation: not merely facilitating the trade of goods but also the percolation of ideas. It is aloof, above the worldly concerns of border guards, passport agents and customs checks.

And in Barlow’s time, the internet did indeed seem to subvert the logic of the nation state. It undermined the most basic building block of the geopolitical order: territorial sovereignty, the notion that a nation controls what goes on in its borders. Behind the Iron Curtain and in religious autocracies, the early internet was a place to explore ideas that couldn’t be expressed in the national press. The elimination of the government-controlled middleman, the radio or TV broadcaster, meant protesters could express themselves freely. The failed coup of August 1991 that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union is a great example. Protestors were able to signal across the fledgling internet that there was a coup underway, even as the unsuccessful rebels shut down CNN and other mass media.42 More broadly, the constant criss-crossing of data – in which ideas might spread from Edinburgh to Évian, Mumbai to Manhattan – helped build a uniquely international culture online.

This isn’t to say that the internet was without national markers. The norms of the early internet had a distinctly American hue. The key protocols, standard procedures, and institutions of governance were almost entirely created by Americans, often sponsored by the US government. And that brought with it a particular set of preoccupations: academic, increasingly liberal, and sceptical of centralised authority. In general, however, the internet promised a global, borderless future.

A quarter of a century after Barlow’s speech, that ideal is in tatters. The internet is turning into a ‘splinternet’, fragmented into regional and national spheres. During the 2010s, governments started to find new ways to bring the internet under the thumb of nation states. Many authorities feared that their citizens’ data might be turned against their people or the state if allowed to flow beyond their borders. The first to understand this were authoritarian regimes. For those living in China, internet use is restricted by vast armies of censors – and by the ‘Great Firewall’, which blocks access to large chunks of the global network. Citizens in Iran, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines and many other countries regularly have their internet access surveilled or blocked.43

More recently, this dynamic has spread to liberal democracies. In many cases, their reasoning is understandable. European data protection laws, namely the General Data Protection Regulation – which imposes a strict set of rules on how companies collect and use data – is perhaps the best example: a benign attempt to protect citizens’ digital rights, which nonetheless places hard limits on how easily data can spread across the world. Elsewhere, governments’ actions have a more authoritarian tinge. India’s national e-commerce policy, for example, argues that

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