Innovatia

create a walled garden internet in India called Free Basics – this led to a massive outcry about corporate control in late 2015 and early 2016. Today, Meta’s breaches of European Union law are placing its business model at risk in the ter- ritory. This broad shift has been described in the past by my colleague Mark Andrejevic in 2007 as dig- ital enclosure – where states and commercial interests increasingly segment, separate and restrict what is accessible on the internet. The uneven overlapping of national regulations and economies will interact oddly with digital services that cut across multiple borders. Fur- ther reductions in network neutrality will open the doors to restrictive internet service provid- er deals, price-based discrimination, and lock- in contracts with content providers.

The existing diversity of experience on the internet will see users’ experiences and access continue to diverge. As internet-based com- panies increasingly rely on exclusive access to users for tracking and advertising, as services and ISPs overcome falling revenue with lock- in agreements, and as government policies change, we’ll see the splintering continue. The splinternet isn’t that different from what we already have. But it does represent an in- ternet that’s even less global, less deliberative, less fair and less unified than we have today. Robbie Fordyce is a lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University.

Many nations effectively have their own in- ternets already. These are still technically con- nected to the rest of the internet, but are sub- ject to such distinct policies, regulations and costs that they are distinctly different for the users. For example, Russia maintains a Sovi- et-era-style surveillance of the internet, and is far from alone in doing so – thanks to Xi Jin- ping, there is now “the great firewall of China”. Surveillance isn’t the only barrier to internet use, with harassment, abuse, censorship, tax- ation and pricing of access, and similar inter- net controls being a major issue across many countries. Content controls aren’t bad in themselves – it’s easy to think of content that most people would prefer didn’t exist. Nonetheless, these national regulations lead to a splintering of in- ternet experience depending on which country you’re in. Indeed, every single country has local factors that shape the internet experience, from

language to law, from culture to censorship. While this can be overcome by tools such as VPNs (virtual private networks) or shifting to blockchain networks, in practice these are indi- vidual solutions that only a small percentage of people use, and don’t represent a stable solution. We’re already on the splinternet In short, it doesn’t fix it for those who aren’t technically savvy and it doesn’t fix the issues with commercial services. Even without cen- sorious governments, the problems remain. In 2021, Facebook shut down Australian news content as a protest against the News Media Bargaining Code, leading to potential change in the industry. Before that, organisations such as Wikipedia and Google protested the winding back of net- work neutrality provisions in the United States in 2017 following earlier campaigns. Facebook (now known as Meta) attempted to

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INNOVATIA

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