Sunday Age, 30 April 2023, excerpts:
Today there are an estimated 5 billion people online. But those users are not all surfing the same web. Sites accessible in, say, Darwin might be blocked in Delhi.
Meanwhile, internet freedom - access without surveillance or suppression - is down for the 12th year in a row, according to US non-profit Freedom House.
Splintering happens at a content level, Sherman explains, as governments censor the way the internet looks in their countries. But the technological bones of the net are cracking too.
After all, the internet is largely run under the sea, not in the Cloud - data zooms along underwater cables snaking between continents. After the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks revealed that US and British intelligence agencies had been spying on traffic around the world via these cables, Brazil announced it was building its own walled-off net (yet to come online) and teamed up with Europe to start rerouting more undersea cables around the US.
As the great powers fight for technological dominance, nations are kicking out foreign tech companies they take issue with - from the US, Australia and other nations banning China's telecom giant Huawei on network infrastructure builds, to Russia labelling Facebook's parent company, Meta, a terrorist organisation.
Now China's technology ministry has joined with a group of its telecoms, including Huawei, to argue that the internet's underlying architecture needs an update. And they have a radical plan: a new IP they've been floating to the United Nations, which critics say will allow for more government control.
How do countries restrict internet freedom?…..
China has been arresting people for online posts since the early years of the "worldwide web". Today, there is no reliable count of how many have served jail time. Dr Li Wenliang, who first raised the alarm over COVID-19 in Wuhan in 2020, for example, was reprimanded for his social media posts before he died of the virus…..
In countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, people are on death row for tweets and Facebook posts. And some regimes, including China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, deploy armies of trolls and bots to intimidate and harass critics online.
Of course, during times of unrest, some governments simply shut down their internet altogether. Think of Iran's blackout after the death of a young woman in the custody of morality police in 2022. That year, 35 countries pulled the plug a total of 187 times - a record high. But shutdowns come at a cost: lost e-commerce, banking and tax transactions, investor trust. Throttling, where a connection is slowed to the point that it becomes nearly impossible to use, is more subtle. Rights groups say it is deployed in Myanmar, Turkey and Russia.
States can also ask internet companies to remove data. Google lists such requests in its transparency report: it has received 3.5 million since 2011. National security is the most common reason, ahead of copyright claims, defamation and privacy. In the past decade, Russia requested by far the most removals from Google services, at more than 123,000, followed by Turkey at about 14,000 and then India, the US and Brazil in that order, with fewer than 10,000 requests each.
Another censorship ploy is DNS manipulation. DNS stands for domain name system: it's the phonebook of the internet. People think of the net in terms of website addresses, like amazon.com or smh.com.au, but these domain names need to be turned into numbers for machines to understand them. That's the job of the DNS. By manipulating the servers that deliver it in a given territory, a user who searches for YouTube, for example, could be redirected to a censored domestic equivalent.
The internet's DNS architecture is overseen by a Californian non-profit with a very literal name: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Russia wants to create its own DNS, claiming it will need one if it's ever severed from the global internet - as Ukraine asked ICANN to do when Russia invaded it in 2022. (ICANN declined Ukraine's request, saying it was neither technically feasible nor within the group's mission.)
But for Russia, this is a key plank in its ambitions to create its own "sovereign internet". To do that, it's looking at its ally China.
What is the gold standard for restricting the net?
When the internet arrived in China just before the turn of the millennium, the Communist Party was already quietly building the means of controlling it. Under Project Golden Shield, China often turned to Western companies for the technology it needed to funnel internet traffic through chokepoints and spy on what flowed in.
Known as China's Great Firewall, it's the world's most extensive internet censorship tool. As the destabilising power of the internet has become clear - including during the Arab Spring of the early 2010s - the firewall has grown "higher".
China now blocks Western social networks, except for a version of LinkedIn stripped of its newsfeed. Google Search has been barred since 2010, when the US company pulled out over a cyber attack and censorship concerns.
"Censorship covers a broad but ambiguous category of keywords and topics," says the Beijing internet user. "We don't know when and where [we'll] hit the red line."
BACKGROUND
The 2023 Index of Economic Freedom lists Australia in 13th place and classifies it as "mostly free" - a drop of ten ranking positions since 2021 when it was classed amongst "the most free".
The Freedom on the Net 2022 report considered Australia ranks 9th out of 70 countries globally, tying with France and the United States, at the time classifying the country as "free".
Meanwhile, in Australia concerns still remain about our implied freedom of political communication under the Australian Constitution and the general public's right to know.
According to Google Transparency, in 2019 Australian federal or state government officials or agencies (including police and the courts) submitted 9 single item or bloc requests to Google Inc. requesting removal or suppression of material indexed in Google Search or found on Google sites such as YouTube and Blogger or services such as Gmail.
In 2020 there were 13 single item or bloc requests to remove or suppress sent to Google from Australia, another 12 such requests in 2021 and 13 such requests in 2022.
Since 2011 Google Inc. has kept a file categorising reasons given by government officials or agencies for submitting these requests.
In the case of Australia from 2011 through to 2022 these categories ranged from National Security, Government Criticism*, Privacy & Security, Defamation, Hate Speech, Impersonation, Bullying/Harassment, Religious Offence, Violence, Fraud, Adult Content, Obscenity/Nudity, Suicide Promotion, Copyright, Trademark, Regulated Goods and Services, Other and Reason Not Stated.
Google Inc. also records government requests for user information.**
In the years January 2014 to June 2022 Google lists receiving 32,103 individual government requests from Australia for user/s information relating to 38,952 accounts.
Note:
* Requests categorized as “Government criticism” are related to claims of criticism of government policy or politicians in their official capacity. Claims in this Google category are are not made by the members of the general public.
https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/7347744?hl=en
** A variety of laws allow government agencies around the world to request the disclosure of user information for civil, administrative, criminal, and national security purposes. Google carefully reviews each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws. If a request asks for too much information, we try to narrow it, and in some cases we object to producing any information at all.
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