Innovatia

our own perspectives on what it’s like to use the internet. Just like standing under “the sky”, our local experience is different to that of oth- ers. No one can see the full picture. A fractured internet poised to fracture even more Was there ever a single “Internet”? Certainly, the US research computer network called AR- PANET in the 1960s was clear, discrete and un- fractured. Alongside this, in the 1960s and ’70s, govern- ments in the Soviet Union and Chile also each worked on similar network projects called OGAS and CyberSyn, respectively. These sys- tems were proto-internets that could have ex-

panded significantly and had themes that res- onate today – OGAS was heavily surveilled by the KGB, and CyberSyn was a social experiment destroyed during a far-right coup. Each was very clearly separate, each was a fractured computer network that relied on government support to succeed, and ARPANET was the only one to succeed due to its signifi- cant government funding. It was the kernel that would become the basis of the internet, and it was Tim Berners-Lee’s work on HTML at CERN that became the basis of the web we have to- day, and something he seeks to protect. Today, we can see the unified “Internet” has given way to a fractured internet – one poised to fracture even more.

WHAT IS THE “SPLINTERNET”?

This article first appeared in The Conversation

As Robbie Fordyce explains, the internet is less whole than you might think and how that may or may not be a good thing.

“Splinternet” refers to the way the internet is be- ing splintered – broken up, divided, separated, locked down, boxed up, or otherwise segmented. Whether for nation states or corporations, there’s money and control to be had by influ- encing what information people can access and share, as well as the costs that are paid for this access. The idea of a splinternet isn’t new, nor is the problem. But recent developments are likely to enhance segmentation, and have brought it back into new light. The internet as a whole The core question is whether we have just one single internet for everyone, or whether we have many. Think of how we refer to things like the sky, the sea, or the economy. Despite these concep- tually being singular things, we’re often only seeing a perspective: a part of the whole that isn’t complete, but we still experience directly. This applies to the internet, too. A large portion of the internet is what’s known as the “deep web”. These are the parts search engines and web crawlers generally don’t go

to. Estimates vary, but a rule of thumb is that approximately 70 per cent of the web is “deep”. Despite the name and the anxious news re- porting in some sectors, the deep web is most- ly benign. It refers to the parts of the web to which access is restricted in some ways. Your personal email is a part of the deep web – no matter how bad your password might be, it requires authorisation to access. So do your Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive accounts. If your work or school has its own servers, these are part of the deep web – they’re connected, but not publicly accessible by default (we hope). We can expand this to things like the experi- ence of multiplayer videogames, most social media platforms, and much more. Yes, there are parts that live up to the ominous name, but most of the deep web is just the stuff that needs password access. The internet changes, too – connections go live, cables get broken or satellites fail, people bring their new Internet of Things devices (like “smart” fridges and doorbells) online, or acci- dentally open their computer ports to the net. But because such a huge portion of the web is shaped by our individual access, we all have

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