Here is China’s blueprint for the sovereign Internet
All of China's aims on the Internet. The point of the analyst Amighini taken from Lavoce.info
For many years, Beijing has been planning the development of an internet technology more in tune with the country's goals. The risk is the creation of a system of less interoperable, less stable and less secure networks. Will democracies be able to avoid it?
The importance of infrastructure
The G7 concluded the Carbis Bay meeting by launching a united vision to "build better" and "rebuild". Perhaps more inspired terms could have been chosen, but there is no doubt that at the frontier of global competition – not only economic but, increasingly, political – there are networks, many of which need to be built or rebuilt.
If the clearly visible transport networks have long attracted the great interest of Beijing (think of the recent Chinese aims on a share of the port of Hamburg, which in turn has acquired part of the port of Trieste), less visible but more insidious are the digital networks.
For many years, China has been planning a technological leap, not necessarily an overtaking, but rather the development of a more independent technology and above all more in tune with the country's objectives. The 14th five-year plan for economic development (2021-2025) also includes what has taken the name of Digital Silk Road, aimed at increasing the country's digital connectivity with the rest of the world, without opening up to international networks, rather developing its own internet and spreading it as much as possible.
This is accompanied by a large presence in e-commerce platforms and the launch of its new digital sovereign currency, the e-CNY. The development and export of physical and digital networks is not disconnected from financial internationalization, on the contrary the former are instrumental to the latter. Overall, in fact, Beijing is preparing to create a series of infrastructures on which to transport – and control – data and money.
Beijing has favored the expansion of its national champion – Huawei – which not only manages networks, but has just announced a new operating system, HarmonyOS. The company also proposes a fundamental rethinking of the internet, called “New IP” and designed to build “intrinsic security” on the web. Intrinsic security means that individuals must register to use the internet, and authorities can shut down an individual user's access at any time. In other words, Huawei is trying to integrate Chinese "social credit", surveillance and censorship regimes into the architecture of the internet.
Open bodies or multilateral institutions?
Huawei's proposal threatens to fragment the internet into a mess of less interoperable, less stable and even less secure networks. The company has bypassed international standardization bodies, where experts could question the technical shortcomings of its proposal. Instead, he worked through the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU), where Beijing has more political influence.
The fact that Huawei has preferred the multilateral context is not a surprise, even if the jurisdiction of the ITU does not include the architecture of the internet. When it comes to internet governance, the Chinese Communist Party and other authoritarian regimes have long favored multilateral international institutions, such as the ITU, over multi-stakeholder ones, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) or the International. Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).
International bodies of this type are in fact governed by a diverse range of representatives of industry, civil society and government, while multilateral institutions only give voting power to national governments. In multi-stakeholder contexts, representatives of civil society and industry tend to favor a free and open internet, which dilutes the influence of national governments, many of which would prefer a strictly regulated and censurable one.
The UN and ITU naturally appear more receptive to proposals such as New IP, which grant national governments greater control over the internet. For example, in 2019, China and Russia leveraged a similar authoritarian bloc within the UN to pass a resolution on cybercrime in their favor.
Today, a similar coalition could help China push through the New IP proposal. Evading conventional internet governance institutions in favor of the ITU would also set a precedent for future proposals in this area, which would increasingly pass through the UN body instead of through more balanced multi-stakeholder institutions.
Nor should it be forgotten that China has held the presidency of the ITU for the past seven years. During his tenure as general secretary, Houlin Zhao encouraged its expansion from a simple telecommunications agency to a "technology agency", working on technologies not related to telecommunications, such as internet architecture, internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence.
Finance runs on the internet
We do not yet know if the G7 will be willing to support its own champion (Ericsson, Nokia or Samsung) to build the infrastructure necessary for all the G7 economies. It could be a solution to allow them to catch up collectively in a world where artificial intelligence will be pervasive. Supporting the expansion of 5G beyond the cluster will prove difficult, however. The inclusion of allies and partners outside the G7, such as Australia, New Zealand and India, would require substantial financial support and technical collaboration.
The future of finance will also navigate the digital networks. According to a report published by Kpmg and H2 Ventures, five Chinese fintech companies are already among the top ten in the world ranking. Compared to all other countries, China also leads in terms of users and market size.
The main players in the Chinese fintech industry are primarily the giants of the internet world, such as Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, which have benefited from the small number of competitors. Followed by Union Pay, Alipay and WeChat Pay, which can be used in daily life not only for online payments, but also for payments via Pos; and almost all Chinese residents now regularly use QR codes. China is relentlessly transforming itself into a cashless society, often even without a bank account or credit card, but almost never without a smart phone.
The Chinese goal in digitizing the country is to create an advanced – and disturbing – form of state that has real-time control of all the movements and transactions of its citizens through their mobile devices, the network and internet applications.
Democracies pursue a very different one. If everything has to go through the net, then a free and open internet is the only guarantee that the world will not end up in pieces, each bounded by the boundaries of their own digital networks.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/ecco-il-progetto-della-cina-per-internet-sovranista/ on Sun, 20 Jun 2021 06:27:36 +0000.