Afew years ago, Facebook started encouraging users to give it their phone numbers. This, it said, was only for security purposes: a way to confirm one's login credentials. Now, as a result, anyone can look up a user's profile via their phone number, Facebook“shares” phone numbers with its other apps (such as Instagram), and advertisers can target those numbers too. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he had developed a new “vision” for social networking that would be “privacy-focused”, and if you believe that then I have a forecast on the economic benefits of Brexit to sell you. And yet, in certain quarters of tech-savvy international relations , it's always China that is blamed for betraying the promise of a free and open internet.
As James Griffiths's excellent book on China's online strategy acknowledges, that promise – the 1990s cyber-utopian vision of an anarchist, autonomous electronic frontier without borders – hardly needed an authoritarian quasi-communist state to betray it. Western corporations did perfectly well on their own. But Griffiths perhaps gives too much credence to that idealistic picture in the first place: the internet was, after all, born from military technology in the first place – the Arpanet, funded by the US Defense Department – and it's not quite accurate to say, as he does, that it was designed without reference to geography. (The decentralised nature of the military network was precisely a geographical strategy to prevent an enemy from taking it down by destroying any particular node.)
What's more, the filtering and censorship technology now used by China to keep its citizens behind the “great firewall” was, as he shows, eagerly supplied for years by US tech corporations, so to complain about what the Chinese have done with it – indeed, to call it, as Griffiths does rather melodramatically, “China's war on the internet” – now is rather like selling bombs to Saudi Arabia and then wringing one's hands when they drop them on people. Filtering and censorship capabilities were themselves built into internet hardware from the very early days. As one of the American engineers who helped network China in the 1990s tells Griffiths: “Nobody questions the authority and right of a corporation to very tightly manage and control and monitor the communications in and out of a company's network. That tech had been built from the very beginning to serve the market of corporate customers. All China did was turn on those switches for the entire country.”
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