The competition between the two major global powers goes beyond politics and economics and extends to the digital world. Beijing offers an alternative Internet, as part of the Digital Silk Road, and is gaining more and more followers. There are currently two competing versions of the Internet. On the one hand there is the United States and private monopolies like Meta, Alphabet and Apple, where consumption and trade come first.
On the other hand there is China, where the Internet is characterized by being a service and monitoring platform and where companies such as ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have almost unlimited market sovereignty.
The Chinese version, known as the “Digital Silk Road,” is part of something larger, the Belt and Road Initiative, a strategy adopted by the Chinese government to increase its influence in Asia and beyond.
“China is seeking to influence global norms through technical standards and multilateral forums,” highlights the China Digital Silk Road report by London-based think tank Article 19.
For example, in the context of the World Internet Conference, organized annually since 2014 by China itself, the Chinese model emphasizes “digital sovereignty”, “state control” and focuses on “cybersecurity, censorship and surveillance”.
One origin, two systems
And, behind these two distinct versions, two different visions of the world are hidden. This can also be seen in the way the Internet is coordinated in the two countries.
“In the United States, most regulations aim to ensure business freedom, while in China national security (and therefore political considerations) play an essential role,” emphasizes Stefan Schmalz, a sociologist at the University of Erfurt in Germany, in his essay Varianten des digitalin Kapitalismus : China und USA im Vergleich (Variants of digital capitalism: China and the USA compared, in free translation).
The fact is that both versions of the Internet are still based on the same basic technology (HTML, TCP/IP, etc.), but they developed separately over the course of Web 2.0, which has been around since the turn of the millennium.
Since then, users have access to more user-friendly apps provided by tech giants like Instagram, WhatsApp, Amazon, etc.
Equivalent parallel platforms have been developed in China. The Chinese version of WhatsApp, for example, is WeChat. For most users, both versions represent two separate worlds that do not communicate with each other.
The break
China began dissociating itself from the Internet, dominated by American companies, in 1998. At the time, the Chinese Communist Party created the Great Firewall to filter unwanted content from abroad. In 2010, Google withdrew from China, among other things, after failing to reach an agreement on censorship guidelines with the government.
In 2011, the authority that regulates the Internet in China at the national level was founded and is responsible for online censorship (and organizes the World Internet Conference). The department is now called the Cyberspace Administration of China.
In this way, the CCP has created a well-defined market, with 1.4 billion Chinese users, in which its digital companies have grown and prospered.
That China’s special path has been successful, in a certain sense, is also demonstrated by the fact that the Chinese Internet giants are now quite competitive with the US ones. The only social network that isn’t from the US and is still globally competitive is TikTok, from China.
The fight for the Internet of the future
But China – as the TikTok case demonstrates – is no longer content with being the parallel world. On the contrary: it wants to expand. The debate about the Internet of the future has been going on for a long time. Private sector, political and geopolitical interests are mixed in the battle for key Internet technology.
The best example is the controversy involving Huawei, one of the world’s largest telecommunications equipment and hardware companies and the largest supplier of 5G technology. Critics in the United States and the West accuse the company of using “a Trojan horse” to enter foreign countries, arguing that Huawei is ultimately obligated to provide information to the CCP.
Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg described the company in their book The Silent Conquest as the best example of “how the CCP combines espionage, intellectual property theft, and influence operations.” Huawei, however, has always denied the allegations and to date there is no evidence that the company actually installs so-called spying backdoors.
China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific
Regardless, the dichotomy of the Internet world continues to spread. In November 2022, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) banned the import and marketing of certain Huawei products in the United States due to national security concerns. In late 2023, China issued a directive requiring government computers not to use Intel chips or Microsoft software as soon as possible.
Third countries that do not have their own technology industry are increasingly having to decide which side they are on. The United States has long been a leader, but in the Indo-Pacific and especially in Cambodia, Pakistan and Thailand, but also in Malaysia and Nepal, China has gained significant influence, according to the think tank Article 19.
No country has reached as far as Cambodia. “It is the best example of a country adopting Chinese-style digital authoritarianism. Since 2021, Cambodia has been working to introduce its own version of the Great Firewall as part of a national internet portal,” the study said.
According to the authors, China is increasingly successful in limiting the free, open and interoperable internet with its Digital Silk Road.
Source: Terra
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