<nettime> John Harris: The global battle for the internet is just starting

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/25/cold-war-digital-china-facebook-mark-zuckerberg



The global battle for the internet is just starting
by John Harris, The Guardian, Mon 25 Mar 2019.

Two competing visions of our digital future have emerged from China and 
Silicon Valley. But are they really so different?


If only for a moment, set aside the comparatively parochial drama of 
Brexit, think about the giant swath of humanity that now uses the 
internet, and consider one of the most basic facets of how 4 billion of 
us live our lives. This is a 21st-century story, but it will ring bells 
with people old enough to remember the cold war: how people understand 
their own experience and events in the wider world is increasingly 
decided by the version of the internet they use.

On one side sits the system used in China, which produces vast amounts 
of personal data and blurs into a huge apparatus of state surveillance 
and censorship. This model is centred on two online behemoths, whose 
dominance partly comes down to the fact that Chinese consumerism is all 
about paying via your smartphone, rather than an old-fashioned plastic 
card. There’s the e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba, and Tencent, which 
owns WeChat, the platform used by more than 1 billion people every day. 
It does so many things – payments, social networking, messaging, travel 
booking, gaming – that participating in society without it seems all but 
impossible.

On the other side of the modern digital divide is the version of the 
internet pioneered in the west and now spreading around the planet, 
which revolves around Google and Facebook. These giants also feast on a 
mountain of personal information, but present themselves as a 
contrasting embodiment of personal freedom and liberal values, even as 
they embed the social model now known as surveillance capitalism.

One of the central questions of our age is which model will become 
pre-eminent, not least among the half of humanity who are not yet 
online. With Donald Trump’s trade war providing a crude kind of mood 
music, the battle so far is not quite as simple as Chinese platforms 
duking it out with their US counterparts: the tech clash has been more 
visible in tensions over nuts-and-bolts infrastructure, particularly 
when it comes to the activities of the IT giant Huawei.
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But look at high levels of tech investment by China in India and Africa, 
the prospect of Alibaba butting heads with Amazon, or the international 
competition between Uber and its Chinese equivalent Didi, and you get a 
flavour of the future – particularly when it comes to China’s mastery of 
mobile payment systems, which leaves most western countries standing. 
Across the world, geopolitics is fast boiling down to whether China or 
the US is the most influential tech player.

Meanwhile, the dominance of life in the west by corporations based in 
the US is being contested as never before. The Democratic presidential 
hopeful Elizabeth Warren says she wants Facebook, Google and Amazon to 
be broken up. The same sentiments are rising among more switched-on 
elements in Congress. As evidenced by the so-called right to be 
forgotten, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and such 
actions as the €1.5bn fine the European commission imposed last week on 
Google (for forcing customers to agree not to accept adverts from other 
search engines), the EU is much further ahead. If our current stereotype 
of legislators and regulators boils down to grey-haired men who barely 
understand how to switch their phones on, that is clearly changing fast.

The new cold war and the race to regulate are the contexts in which we 
have to understand everything that western big tech now does – something 
that applies particularly to the Facebook founder and CEO, Mark 
Zuckerberg. Ten years ago, he professed to believe in an ideal he called 
“radical transparency”, and “the concept that the world will be better 
if you share more”.

Now, panicked by his company’s seemingly endless fall from grace, he 
says he is pursuing “a privacy-based vision for social networking”. 
Logically, the two ideas cancel each other out, revealing something much 
more prosaic: the sense that he is desperately trying to escape the 
clutches of his potential regulators, so that Facebook remains at the 
core of the western internet, ready to be endlessly pushed into new 
global markets.

Just over two weeks ago Zuckerberg put up a long post that announced his 
intention to develop a “privacy-focused communications platform [that] 
will become even more important than today’s open platforms”, based on 
message encryption, and the idea – copied from Snapchat – of content 
deleting itself, so as not to come back to haunt the people who post it. 
But what actually matters is that he wants to combine the messaging 
services offered by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which will surely 
make any attempt to break these entities up all the more difficult.

For the foreseeable future, old-style Facebook will carry on. Meanwhile, 
on their new platform, Zuckerberg and his colleagues are likely to still 
amass huge amounts of metadata (who we talk to and for how long, and 
where we are), while encryption takes the heat off their company’s 
absurdly overburdened moderators: as and when its users foment unrest 
and abuse, Facebook’s high-ups will be able to deny any agency, and 
stand well back. But most eye-watering of all is the sheer reach of 
Zuckerberg’s new creation: his plan is to “make it as secure as 
possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of 
that, including calls, video chats … businesses, payments, commerce, and 
ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services”.

This is precisely the WeChat model of an app that does just about 
everything, including handling everyday personal finance, thereby 
ensuring an endless avalanche of data. What that highlights is not just 
the scale of Facebook’s undimmed ambitions and Zuckerberg’s questionable 
new embrace of “privacy”, but something that attracts surprisingly 
little attention: the sense that even as the eastern and western models 
of the internet compete for global influence, they are converging.

Perhaps we should not be that surprised. At the height of the cold war, 
for all their mutual animosity, it was fashionable to talk about the US 
and Soviet Union as increasingly similar societies, subject to what the 
social theorist Herbert Marcuse called “common requirements of 
industrialisation”, and both in thrall to bureaucracy and centralised 
planning. In the wake of the revolutions of 1989 the basic idea flipped, 
so that east and west were said to be heading into a shared future of 
liberal democracy and free markets, a vision also projected on to an 
increasingly prosperous China, until the arrival of President Xi Jinping 
heralded something much more problematic.

Now convergence is here again, but this time it is all about 
surveillance, behavioural nudging, and companies so huge that they 
intrude on every part of our lives. The danger is the world falling 
between two visions that are too close for comfort: on the one hand, 
surveillance and censorship perpetrated by companies in brazen cahoots 
with authoritarian states; on the other, all-seeing tech corporations 
whose ties to government remain shadowy and opaque, which is part of 
what Edward Snowden came forward to tell us.

Legislators, regulators, developers and entrepreneurs should take note: 
if 21st-century democracy and the most basic ideas of citizenship are to 
mean anything, the western internet ought not to be converging with 
China’s, but pulling in the opposite direction.


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