35+ Countries Are Leaving the Global Internet

this video was sponsored by brilliant the days of the internet being a true Global Network are coming to an end the decoupling started two and a half decades ago when countries like China and North Korea started Walling their networks off from the rest of the world and it has accelerated rapidly in the last few years by today politicians from Russia Iran turkey India and much of the rest of the global South have tightened their grips on their internet significantly and even the EU and the US are starting to draw up lines around their borders demanding data localization and banning what they consider to be foreign propaganda we are on the verge of a so-called Splinter net not one Global Network where information travels freely across borders but a patchwork of many smaller ones that are allowed to communicate with each other only when and how their leaders decide to I've already made a dedicated video about how Russia is cutting themselves off the global web which you can watch somewhere here but in this video Let's Take a global look at what patterns and Technologies countries around the world are using it to isolate themselves [Music] of April 1994 China connected itself to the global internet for the first time ever from there it only took three years for the term the great Chinese firewall to be coined by China Watchers and journalists as the government quickly made it known that a completely free connection was not their intention at all they started with just some simple legal restrictions at first and for about a decade many scholars doubted that real control over a network as vast and chaotic as the internet was even possible but the government soon proved that it very much was China early on realized that they didn't need a complete seal with absolute control around their internet but just a semi-permeable great firewall that put up some very specific limits this system would be easier to maintain an effect it would be much more beneficial for the government too some information leaking in and out of the country was a feature not a bug International traffic was allowed to flow in and out of country but bandwidth was painfully slow for daily use foreign websites did load by default but they got blacklisted once they grew too problematic workarounds like vpns were usually tolerated most of the time but they were made unbeliable enough to become inconvenient on a daily basis and they were shut down completely during sensitive political events and foreign internet companies from Facebook to Google to Uber were all initially allowed to set up offices and operate in China too but they were never allowed to truly win any crucial markets for themselves and they were eventually thrown out of the country once they got too big to control like Facebook this perrose firewall ensured that people who needed Global access to information like researchers and scientific departments or companies with foreign clients they could always kind of get through the firewall and it also made sure that Chinese domestic companies would be exposed to International competitors that gave them lots of good ideas and kept them on their toes but it also made foreign Services unreliable enough where the mainstream population learned to never truly rely on them for day-to-day activities under this system of carefully balanced isolation China built a parallel fully independent internet for itself with domestic firms for everything from payments to ride hailing to social media and with those Services being built exclusively on domestic cloud services apis Etc while only foreign firms like apple that could not easily be kicked out of the country were simply ordered to process most of their user data within China and often even to hand over control to their domestic servers to state-owned Enterprises with this careful Balancing Act China achieved something pretty remarkable a domestic internet that is basically fully independent and doesn't actually need access to the rest of the world this level of control is pretty mind-boggling and it gives the Chinese government an incredible amount of control over both their population and their economy and as you might expect a lot of other countries have looked at this system and said yeah maybe we should replicate that there are now dozens of countries following in China's footsteps trying to establish a splinter net often with the help of China of course and a sort of Playbook with three distinct levels of splintering has emerged over time the most basic type of control that governments typically gravitate to in order to exert control over their internet is a blackout where internet service providers are simply ordered to shut their services down temporarily during politically sensitive periods Iran for example ordered its first full Countrywide internet blackout in 2009 during major anti-government protests which allowed the country to violently crack down on protesters while limiting their options to organize at home and also to ask for help from the outside cutting them off from the rest of the world completely and in 2021 34 countries in total pushed similar blackouts through in 182 separate instances to Crackdown on protests India alone staggeringly accounted for more than a hundred different Regional blackouts during this year while Ethiopia is winning the dubious title of the longest blackout at 18 months and Counting these blackouts require no skill and no special equipment so there the most common way for governments to start cutting their population off from the rest of the world at least from the rest of the internet but they are of course blunt instruments because they don't just hurt the protesters but basically everyone in their vicinity so a lot of countries have started wanting to get much more fine-grained abilities to Target who they want to block and when [Music] a 9 out of 10 protesters in Egypt and Tunisia that were pulled during the Arab Spring in 2010 claimed that they used Facebook to organize protests and to spread awareness and protests clearly spilled from one country over to another via the internet as well eventually engulfing the whole region blocking Site Services has Facebook and information from abroad in general has therefore become a high priority for many governments around the world fearing protests but those governments have also seen that many of the protests went on for years so temporary blackouts were clearly not a good enough solution governments didn't just want a simple off switch for the internet they wanted the ability to permanently filter specific parts of the internet while the rest of it could stay up and running and they wanted to keep those on for long periods of time and they found a couple of ways of achieving this at the simplest level governments often just order companies to take down content like how India ordered the removal of hundreds of Chinese apps from mobile app stores or how governments like Russia and Turkey routinely ask companies like Google to hide certain videos and search results in their countries companies can simply refuse to honor these requests especially if they're from abroad so these are hardly bulletproof Solutions but they require basically no technical skill or equipment or anything at all so they remain popular however lots of governments have also started moving towards acquiring technical capabilities to enforce some of their filters there are simple technical enforcements like the Indian government simply ordering to block the IP addresses of certain websites like the VLC media player for some bizarre reason which are pretty easy to get around for anyone with even the most minimal amount of motivation or they're also more sophisticated methods like deep packet inspection for example with DPI internet service providers actually start analyzing and filtering the individual data packets that flow through their networks in real time and they try to figure out their recipients and their content so they can block those based on government orders and this kind of filtering is both much harder for users to get around and also harder for governments to implement especially with a vpns and encryption and other privacy Technologies increasingly making their jobs harder proper DPI requires analyzing and filtering and processing all the data that flows through a country's internet in real time it requires specialized routers specialized software specialized skills so this is hardly a trivial thing to do at all but thankfully for I guess thankfully for authoritarian governments they don't actually have to do most of the heavy lifting themselves companies like Amethyst from France were happy enough to sell their deep packet inspection Technologies to Libya's authoritarian leader Muhammad Gaddafi before his death Cisco from the U.S gladly supplied Indonesia's Network operators with a monitoring Technologies for example and of course the Us and other Western Nations together with their technology suppliers do plenty of network monitoring at home and abroad as well and while Titan sanctions have mostly stopped Western exports to some of the most authoritarian countries lately China has made it their official government policy to expand on these exports and to fill those gaps next to roads and bridges and ports Etc China's Flagship belt and Road initiative explicitly aims to build Telecom infrastructure in developing nations most of Africa for example has had their networks build financed and partially operated by Huawei and ZTE in what experts call a Chinese telecommunications war in Africa and you might also remember Chinese a telecom giant zde repeatedly clashing with U.S Regulators over providing a telecom monitoring equipment to sanctioned Iran as well what exactly China builds into their exports is really hard to say from public sources but the working theory is that government can basically order a convenient package of Hardware like routers and switches and radio and whatever together with all the monitoring Tech as well all from China even financed by China and so it's likely that we're going to see a lot more of this content filtering systems in more and more countries in the future in practice today from what I can tell only Russia Iran and turkey have so far demonstrated a strong real-world capabilities in permanently blocking undesired services in sophisticated ways including even the ability to block some VPN providers and to filter out individual text messages for example and meanwhile countries like Indonesia Malaysia and Egypt have pushed through more temporary filters using similar techniques though again many more are expected in the future Beyond just filtering though the kind of end goal for many governments around the world the dream state that they'd like to be in is to kind of replicate what China has which is to not just have the ability to individually block out things from abroad but rather to have a domestic internet that is fully independent from the rest that if they want they can completely isolate Iran for example calls their effort the national Information Network and Russia calls theirs runet and such systems consist of two basic building blocks first the government must be in control of all cross-border exchange points so it can stop traffic flowing through them if it wants to and second it must make sure that there are a number of domestic services that can continue to operate with the connections shot this means cutting out the Reliance on any foreign hosting companies content delivery networks apis plugins basically everything and replacing them with domestic Alternatives it means basically recreating the entire internet at home just like China has done in 2019 Iran demonstrated their Network when they successfully cut International connections while keeping some domestic Services running these included a few Banks a few state owned or at least State adjacent messaging apps a ride hailing app a domestic search engine and a few other basic services like it this isolation was implemented during a particularly brutal set of crackdowns that killed an estimated 1 500 people Iran fought especially hard to suppress information from spreading outside of the country meanwhile Russia has notably claimed to have basically the same capabilities saying that their core message and apps would survive an isolation event but unlike Iran they haven't actually clearly demonstrated this capability in practice yet now what Iran and Russia have achieved is a far cry from the level of Independence that China has built for itself over the last two and a half decades or so and no other country has even gotten close to what Iran and Russia has done and it's kind of easy to understand why full Independence is incredibly difficult to achieve being independent requires nothing less than kind of mirror hearing what the entire rest of the internet has achieved and keeping up with what it will build next each country on their own China's own internet needed decades to become a truly competitive and only did so because of their massive domestic Market that can sustain a truly world-class companies all on its own Russia a huge country with lots of resources has seen some success with payment systems like mirror cloud services like Yandex cloud and user-facing solutions like VK and mail.ru building real competitive Solutions but Russia is still far from having a full replacement for the entire internet and meanwhile Iran's solution of keeping just a few core services like banking running during a blackout it seems like a big achievement but also a very narrow definition of independence there is simply no country with an economy strong and robust enough other than China and the United States that could actually have a hope at maintaining a massive global fully competitive internet ecosystem all at home now there is a chance that some governments will bend together to create a sort of alternative block of Allied states that shared their networks with each other but not the rest of the world kind of like what the socialist countries did with their economies during the Cold War but we haven't really seen that happen yet and China the biggest player by far that could be part of such a block seems very unlikely to let anyone into their internet bubble so we'd have to wait and see how that would play out the original inventors of the internet back in the 1960s actually calculated with a mathematical certainty the exact design that would make their networks as efficient as possible years before they actually got funding to build out any of our current tcpip-based systems we have long moved away from their original designs but if understanding how Engineers design complex systems sounds interesting to you or maybe even like something that you would like to do yourself as a career then check out my sponsor brilliant brilliant is the best online resource to learn as stem skills from basic maths to Advanced algorithms physics engineering and also computer science and it includes classes from not just industry experts but lately even YouTubers like real engineering and kutzkes act brilliant courses cover topics from beginner to Advanced levels I lately did one on Quantum Computing and it was fantastic and what is special about brilliant's approach is that they design every part of their teach to be super interactive each big concept is broken down into smaller chunks that are easy to digest on their own and those are then practiced right away with an exercise to make sure that the learnings stick this way of learning by doing is proven to be super effective you can try brilliant for free at brilliant.org Tech Altar and if you're one of the first 200 people who sign up using that link you'll also get 20 off your annual premium subscription so check them out and I'll see you in the next video foreign [Music]

Channel: TechAltar

Views: 573,117

Keywords: Russia, China, Intranet, Splinternet, Runet, Great Firewall, Iran, National information network, global internet, web, global web, tcp, IP, tcp/ip, blocking, blocked, blackout, shutdown, internet, censorship

Id: dprdD8j2KZw

Length: 16min 8sec (968 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 19 2022