Splinternet is a term that simply refers to the division of the internet. But this division is more; There will be a division due to trade, politics, religion, technology and national interests.
For national governments or corporations, there is money and control that can be gained by influencing the information people can access and share. With this effect, gains and control can be achieved by manipulating many factors, including the costs paid for access to information.
The idea of Splinternet is also nothing new. However, recent developments have increased the division and brought it to the agenda again.
Internet as a whole
The real question here is whether there is one internet for all or many internets. Much of the internet is what’s known as the “deep web.” This area is usually inaccessible by search engines and web crawlers. According to estimates, about 70% of the web is said to be here.
Despite its name and some alarming news, the deep web is generally harmless. Your personal email account is part of the deep web that requires authorization for access. So do your Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive accounts. If your workplace or school has its own servers, they are also part of the deep web.
We can extend this to much more, from multiplayer video games to most social media platforms. Yes, although there are regions that match the scary name, most of the deep web consists of content that only requires password access. And this content is naturally not accessible to search engines.
But when we talk about the split internet, we are not just talking about the deep web.
A fragmented internet is preparing to fragment further
But really, has there ever been a single internet? It definitely did. In the 1960s, the US network called ARPA was not openly divided. In addition, in the 60s and 70s, the governments of the Soviet Union and Chile worked on similar network projects called OGAS and CyberSyn, respectively.
Each was clearly separate from the other and needed government support to succeed. ARPANET was the only network that was successful thanks to significant government funding. This was the core that would form the basis of the internet, and Tim Berners-Lee’s work on HTML at CERN formed the basis of the web we have today.
Today, the unified internet has been replaced by a fragmented internet. There is an internet that is ready to break even further.
Many countries already have their own internet network. While these networks are technically still connected to the public internet, they differ as they are subject to different policies, regulations and costs for users. Russia, for example, maintains Soviet-era-style internet surveillance, and it’s not exclusive to Russia. China, led by Xi Jinping, is following the same path. Surveillance isn’t the only barrier to internet use. Similar internet controls such as harassment, abuse, censorship, access tax, access fee are a serious problem in many countries.
Indeed, each country has local factors that shape the internet experience, from language to law, culture to censorship. While this situation can be overcome with VPNs or tools that migrate to blockchain networks, in practice these are individual solutions that only a small percentage of people use and do not provide a stable solution.
We are already at the beginning of Splinternet
All this shows that the internet is already divided. And problems persist, even without censoring governments.
In 2021, Facebook turned off news content in Australia in protest of a law enacted in Australia, leading to a potential change in the industry. Prior to that, organizations like Wikipedia and Google protested the withdrawal of net neutrality provisions in the US in 2017.
Facebook (now Meta) has attempted to create a walled internet garden called Free Basics in India. This led to a major backlash on corporate control in late 2015 and early 2016. Today, Meta’s violation of EU law also puts the business model in the region at risk.
The uneven overlap between national regulations and economies can result in a strange interaction with digital services that cross borders. The diversity of experiences available on the Internet indicates that user experiences and access will continue to diversify. We will see this fragmentation continue as Internet-based companies become increasingly dependent on private access for user tracking and advertising, and as government policies change.
Splinternet isn’t all that different from what we already have. But it represents a less global, less deliberative, less fair, and less unified internet than it is today. In other words, it does not mean an internet that is fragmented by regional applications as it is now, but a real fragmented internet that will be formed later. It seems we are not far from that; It can even be said that we are at the beginning…
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