BBC - Future - The Global Internet Is Disintegrating. What Comes Next

5/16/2019 BBC - Future - The global internet is disintegrating. What comes next?
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The global internet is disintegrating. What comes next?
Russia is the latest country to try to find ways to police its online borders,
sparking the end of the internet as we know it.
By Sally Adee
15 May 2019
In 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, ending 30 years of war across Europe and bringing
about the sovereignty of states. The rights of states to control and defend their own territory became
the core foundation of our global political order, and it has remained unchallenged since.
www.bbc.com/future/story/20190514-the-global-internet-is-disintegrating-what-comes-next 1/46
In 2010, a delegation of countries – including Syria and Russia – came to an obscure agency of the
United Nations with a strange request: to inscribe those same sovereign borders onto the digital world.
“They wanted to allow countries to assign internet addresses on a country by country basis, the way
country codes were originally assigned for phone numbers,” says Hascall Sharp, an independent
internet policy consultant who at the time was director of technology policy at technology giant Cisco.
After a year of negotiating, the request came to nothing: creating such boundaries would have allowed
nations to exert tight controls over their own citizens, contravening the open spirit of the internet as a
borderless space free from the dictates of any individual government.
Nearly a decade on, that borderless spirit seems like a quaint memory. The nations who left the UN
empty-handed had not been disabused of the notion that you could put a wall around your corner of
cyberspace. They’ve simply spent the past decade pursuing better ways to make it happen.
Indeed, Russia is already exploring a novel approach to creating a digital border wall, and last month it
passed two bills that mandate technological and legal steps to isolate the Russian internet. It is one of
a growing number of countries that has had enough of the Western-built, Western-controlled internet
backbone. And while Russia’s efforts are hardly the first attempt to secure exactly what information
can and can’t enter a country, its approach is a fundamental departure from past efforts.
“This is different,” says Robert Morgus, a senior cybersecurity analyst at the New America Foundation.
“Russia’s ambitions are to go further than anyone with the possible exceptions of North Korea and Iran
in fracturing the global internet.”
Russia's increasingly restrictive internet policies have sparked protests across the country, including this
demonstration in Moscow in March 2019 (Credit: Getty Images)
Russia’s approach is a glimpse into the future of internet sovereignty. Today, the countries pursuing
digital “Westphalianism” are no longer just the usual authoritarian suspects, and they are doing so at
deeper levels than ever before. Their project is aided as much by advances in technology as by
growing global misgivings about whether the open internet was ever such a good idea to start with.
The new methods raise the possibility not only of countries pulling up their own drawbridges, but of
alliances between like-minded countries building on these architectures to establish a parallel internet.
What’s wrong with the open internet?
It’s well known that some countries are unhappy with the Western coalition that has traditionally held
sway over internet governance. It’s not just the philosophies espoused by the West that troubles them,
but the way those philosophies were baked into the very architecture of the internet, which is rather
famously engineered to ensure no one can prevent anyone from sending anything to anyone.
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That’s thanks to the baseline protocol the 2010 delegation were trying to work around: TCP/IP
(transmission control protocol/internet protocol) allows information to flow with absolutely no regard for
geography or content. It doesn’t care what information is being sent, what country it’s coming from, or
the laws in the country receiving it; all it cares about is the internet address at either end of the
transaction. Which is why, instead of sending data across predetermined paths, which might be
diverted or cut off, TCP/IP will get packets of information from point A to point B by any means
necessary.
It’s easy to dismiss objections to this setup as the dying cries of authoritarian regimes in the face of a
global democratising force – but the problems that arise don’t just affect authoritarian regimes. Any
government might be worried about malicious information like malware reaching military
installations and critical water and power grids, or fake news influencing the electorate.
Although governments may claim that internet sovereignty protects its citizens from malware, many fear losing the
freedom of the "open internet" (Credit: Getty Images)
“Russia and China were just earlier than others in understanding the potential impact that a massively
open information ecosystem would have on humans and human decision-making, especially at the
political level,” says Morgus. Their view was that a country’s citizens are just as much a part of the
critical infrastructure as power plants, and they need to be “protected” from malicious information
targeting them – in this case fake news rather than viruses. But this is not about protecting citizens as
much as controlling them, says Lincoln Pigman, a Russia scholar at the University of Oxford and a
research fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre think tank in London.
A sovereign internet is not a separate internet
Russia and China started talking publicly about the “sovereign internet” around 2011 or 2012, as
Russia’s two-year “winter of protest” was beginning to take hold, and as internet-borne revolutions
rocked other authoritarian regimes. Convinced that these revolts had been stirred up by Western
states, Russia sought to stop disruptive influences from reaching their citizens – essentially creating
checks at its digital borders.
But internet sovereignty is not as simple as cutting yourself off from the global internet. That may seem
counterintuitive, but to illustrate how self-defeating such a move would be, one need look no further
than North Korea. A single cable connects the country to the rest of the global internet. You can
disconnect it with the flip of a switch. But few countries would consider implementing a similar
infrastructure. From a hardware perspective alone, it’s close to impossible.
“In countries with rich and diverse connectivity to the rest of the internet, it would be virtually
impossible to identify all the ingress and egress points,” says Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, who maps the network of physical pipes and cables through which
the global internet runs. Even if Russia could somehow find all the hardware by which information
travels into and out of the country, it wouldn’t serve them very well to close these faucets, unless they
are also happy to be separated from the world economy. The internet is now a vital part of global
commerce, and Russia can’t disconnect itself from this system without mangling its economy.
The internet in most countries relies on many physical entry points (Credit: Getty Images)
The trick, it would seem, is to keep some types of information flowing freely while impeding others. But
how can this sort of internet sovereignty possibly work, given TCP/IP’s notorious agnosticism?
The leader in separating problematic from authorised internet content has traditionally been China. Its
Golden Shield, otherwise known as the Great Firewall of China, famously employs filters to selectively
block certain internet addresses, certain words, certain IP addresses and so on. This solution is by no
means perfect: it’s software-based, meaning that programmers can design further software to
circumvent it. Virtual Private Networks and censorship avoidance software like Tor get around it.
More to the point, the Chinese system won’t work for Russia. For one thing, “it relies heavily on the big
Chinese platforms taking the content down”, says Adam Segal, a cybersecurity expert with US think
tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, whereas Russia is “more reliant on US social media
companies”.
Much of China’s advantage also comes down to the physical pipes its internet is built on. China,
suspicious of the new Western technology from the get-go, only permitted very few entry and exit
points to be built from the global internet into its borders, whereas Russia was initially quite welcoming
of the internet boom and is now consequently riddled with interconnects. China simply has fewer
digital borders to keep an eye on.
China's "Great Firewall" allows the government to to have some control over what information enters the country,
but it can be circumvented (Credit: Getty Images)
So, Russia can’t afford to turn itself into a corporate internet. And it can’t replicate China’s approach.
Russia is therefore working on a hybrid method that neither relies entirely on hardware nor on software
– instead messing with the set of processes and protocols that determine whether internet traffic can
move from its origin to its intended destination. Internet protocols specify how all information must be
addressed by your computer, in order to be transmitted and routed across the global wires; it’s a bit
like how a Windows machine knows it can’t boot up an Apple operating system. This is not one
specific thing. “In effect a protocol is a combination of different things – like data, an algorithm, IP
address – across different layers,” says Dominique Lazanski, who works on international internet
governance and consults on standards development.
One of the most fundamental of these is the DNS standard – the address book that tells the internet
how to translate an IP address, for example 38.160.150.31, into a human-legible internet address like
bbc.co.uk, and points the way to the server that houses that IP location.
It’s DNS that Russia has been setting its sights on. At the beginning of April, the country was
supposed to test a new method of isolating the entire country’s internet traffic so that citizen internet
traffic would only stay within the country’s geographical boundaries instead of bouncing around the
world. The plan – which was met with skepticism from much of the engineering community, if not
dismissed outright – was to create a Russia-only copy of the DNS servers (the internet’s address
book, currently headquartered in California) so that citizens’ traffic would be exclusively directed to
Russian sites, or Russian versions of external sites. It would send Russian internet users to Yandex if
they typed in Google, or the social network VK instead of Facebook.
To lay the groundwork for this, Russia spent years enacting laws that force international companies to
store all Russian citizens’ data inside the country – leading some companies such as LinkedIn to be
blocked when they refused to comply.
“If Russia succeeds in its ultimate plans for a national DNS, there wouldn’t be any need for filtering out
international information. Russian internet traffic would just never need to leave the country,” says
Morgus. “That means that the only stuff that Russians – or anyone – would be able to access from
inside Russia is information that's hosted inside Russia, on servers physically in the country. That
would also mean no one can access external information, whether that is their external cash or
whether it's Amazon to buy that scarf.”
Most experts acknowledge that Russia’s primary goal in doing this is to increase its control over its
own citizens. But the action may have global consequences too.
Governments hoping to gain "digital sovereignty" must find a way to control what information enters a country
without blocking useful economic transactions (Credit: Getty Images)
The approaches taken by Russia and China are too expensive for smaller countries to emulate, but
that doesn’t mean they won’t be influential. “The spread particularly of repressive policies or illiberal
internet architecture is like a game of copycat,” says Morgus. His observation is borne out by research
done by Jaclyn Kerr at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Authoritarian adoption of digital
solutions that shape the extent and type of Internet control they exert, she finds, is likely driven by
three variables. The first is just what’s available out there. The second is whether the regime can
afford to implement any of the available options. The third variable – “the policies selected by the
states in the regime’s reference group” – is a kind of keeping up with the Joneses that explains why it
has been described as a game of copycat: what policies have its buddies endorsed or chosen? This
often hinges on the attitude of the regime; are its friends open or illiberal when it comes to internet
control?
Regarding the first variable, Russia's neighbours, like the Central Asian Republics, could certainly
leverage Russia's architecture – like the Russian DNS – to connect only to the RUnet version of the
internet. This would essentially expand the proposed borders of the RUnet to their periphery, says
Morgus.
The digital deciders
As regards the third variable, the list of countries that find themselves attracted to more authoritarian
internet governance seems to be growing. Not all countries fall neatly into one or the other of the
“open internet” and “authoritarian repressive” peer groups when it comes to how they treat their
countries’ internet. Israel for example, lies neatly between the two extremes, as Morgus and his
colleagues Jocelyn Woolbright and Justin Sherman pointed out in a paper published last year. They
found that over the past four years, “digital decider” states – Israel, Singapore, Brazil, Ukraine, and
India among others – have drifted increasingly toward a more sovereign and closed approach to
information. The reasons for their drift are varied, but several of these countries are in similar
situations: Ukraine, Israel, and South Korea, which exist in a perpetual state of conflict, have found
their adversaries weaponising the internet against them. Some experts find that the strategic use of
the internet – in particular social media – has become like war. Even South Korea – despite its
reputation as open and global – has developed a groundbreaking technique to crack down on illegal
information online.
But can the deciders really copy China or Russia’s model? China’s technological means to sovereignty
is too idiosyncratic for smaller countries to follow; Russia’s is not yet fully tested. Both cost a minimum
of hundreds of millions to set up.
India is considered one of the "digital deciders" that might influence the fate of the internet (Credit: Getty Images)
Two of the largest “digital decider” countries, Brazil and India, have long sought a way to deal with the
global internet that relies neither on the “open values” of the West nor on closed national intranets.
“Their internet and political values sit very much in the middle of the spectrum,” says Morgus. For the
better part of the last decade, both have tried to come up with a viable alternative to the two opposing
versions of the internet we see today.
That innovation was hinted at in 2017, when the Russian propaganda site RT reported that Brazil and
India would team up with Russia, China and South Africa, to develop an alternative they referred to
as the BRICS Internet. Russia claimed it was creating the infrastructure to “shield them from external
influence”.
The plan fell through. “Both Russia and China were interested in pursuing BRICS, but the rest were
less enthusiastic,” says Lazanski. “Brazil’s change in leadership in particular derailed it.”
Belt Road Initiative
Some see the groundwork being laid for a second try in the guise of China’s Belt and Road Initiative,
China’s “21st Century silk road” project to connect Asia to Europe and Africa by building a vast
network of overland corridors, shipping lanes and telecommunications infrastructure in countries like
Tajikistan, Djibouti and Zimbabwe. According to estimates from the International Institute for Strategic
Studies in London, China is now engaged in some 80 telecommunications projects around the world –
from laying cables to building core networks in other countries, contributing to a significant and
growing Chinese-owned global network.
Some countries may break away and build their own infrastructure that is independent of the Western internet
(Credit: Getty Images)
“There could be a very significant infrastructure element to these plans,”says Sim Tack, an analyst
formerly with Jane’s who now works with the intelligence group Stratfor. One possibility is a scenario
where enough of these countries join Russia and China to develop a similar infrastructure to a point
where they could sustain each other economically without doing business with the rest of the world,
meaning they could shut themselves off the Western internet. Smaller countries might prefer an
internet built around a non-Western standard, and an economic infrastructure built around China might
be the “third way” that allows countries to participate in a semi-global economy while being able to
control certain aspects of their populations’ internet experience. Tack, however, argues that such a
“self-sustainable walled off internet economy, while possible, is also extremely unlikely.”
Maria Farrell of the internet freedom campaign organisation Open Rights Group doesn’t think it’s too
far-fetched, though the separate internet may take a slightly different form. The Belt and Road
Initiative, she says, offers a plug-and-play internet that gives “decider” countries, for the first time, an
option for getting online that does not depend on the Western internet infrastructure.
“What China has done is put together a whole suite of not just technology, but information systems,
censorship training, and model laws for surveillance,” she says. “It’s the full kit, and the laws, and the
training, to execute a Chinese version of the internet.” It’s cheap. And it’s being sold as a credible
alternative to a Western internet that increasingly feels “open” in name only. “Nations like Zimbabwe
and Djibouti, and Uganda, they don’t want to join an internet that’s just a gateway for Google and
Facebook” to colonise their digital spaces, she says. Neither do these countries want to welcome this
“openness” offered by the Western internet only to see their governments undermined by espionage.
Along with every other expert interviewed for this article, Farrell reiterated how unwise it would be
underestimate the ongoing reverberations of the Snowden revelations – especially the extent to which
they undermined the decider countries’ trust in the open web.
“The poorer countries especially, that scared the bejesus out of them,” she says. “It showed what we
had all suspected was actually true.”
Just as Russia is working to reinvent DNS, the Belt and Road Initiative’s plug-and-play authoritarian
internet gives countries that sign up access to China’s [bespoke] internet protocols. “TCP/IP is not a
static standard,” points out David Conrad, chief technology officer of the International Corporation of
Assigned Names and Numbers, which issues and oversees major domain names, and runs DNS. “It is
always evolving. Nothing on the internet is unchanging.”
But their evolution is careful and slow and based on global consensus on a single internet. If that were
to change, TCP/IP might well bifurcate, says Morgus. For well over a decade, China and Russia have
been pushing the internet community to nudge the protocol toward greater identifiability, adds Farrell, a
development that won’t surprise anyone familiar with its mass adoption of face recognition for tracking
its citizens in the physical world.
Western contagion
But maybe the authoritarian countries have less of a job to do than they thought.
“More and more Western countries are being forced to think about what that means, sovereignty on
the internet,” says Tack. In the wake of recent election meddling, and the well-documented practice by
Russian governments to sow discord on Western social media, Western policymakers woke up to the
idea that an open and free internet could actually harm democracy itself, Morgus says. “The parallel
rise of populism in the United States and elsewhere, coupled with concerns about the collapse of
liberal international order, saw many of the traditional open internet sword-bearers retreat into their
shells.”
Threats to the "open internet" continue to excite passionate responses - but some experts believe that change is
now inevitable (Credit: Getty Images)
“It’s not about bad countries and good countries – it’s about any country that wants to suppress
communications,” says Milton Mueller, who runs the Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech
University in Atlanta. “The worst thing I’ve seen lately is the British online harms bill.” This white
paper proposes the creation of an independent regulator, tasked with establishing good practices for
internet platforms to follow and punishments to mete out if they don’t. These “good practices” limit the
kind of information that would be familiar to anyone keeping up with recent Russian internet laws:
revenge porn, hate crimes, harassment and trolling, content uploaded by prisoners, and
disinformation.
Indeed, the very multinationals that decider countries fear today might be eager to be enlisted to help
them meet their goals of information sovereignty. Facebook has recently capitulated to growing
pressure by calling for government regulation to determine, among other things, what
constitutes harmful content: “hate speech, terrorist propaganda and more”. Google is rather
famously working to have its cake and eat it too, by providing an open internet in the West (which it
may open to Western governments every now and again) and a censored search engine in the East. “I
suspect there will always be a tension between desires to limit communication but not limit the benefits
that communication can bring,” says Conrad.
A separate internet for some, Facebook-mediated sovereignty for others: whether the information
borders are drawn up by individual countries, coalitions, or global internet platforms, one thing is clear
– the open internet that its early creators dreamed of is already gone.
“The internet hasn’t been one globally connected thing in a long time,” says Lazanski.
--
Sally Adee is a freelance science and technology writer. She blogs at the science writing collective
The Last Word on Nothing.
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Can blue lights prevent suicide at train stations?
Japanese train companies appeared to have found that soothing blue lights
could reduce the rate of suicides at station. But does the "nudge technique"
really work? And if so, how?
By Chris Baraniuk
23 January 2019
In 2013, a scientific paper was published that would become the seed for thousands of viral news
stories and social media posts. The suggestion was astounding: blue lamps at train stations prevented
suicides at those locations. And scientists could even show that the suicides fell by as much as
84%.
The idea has since caught on, inspiring similar projects in many other countries. But as with many
interesting but complex science stories, some of the details have got a little distorted as it was passed
along the way.
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It all started in the late 2000s, when a number of Japanese railway companies began installing blue
lamps above train station platforms. It was an attempt to deter people from suicide in such places – a
so-called “nudge” technique. Nudge techniques are ways of influencing behaviour that, although
apparently subtle, can have surprisingly large impacts.
In one study, people who had experienced

psychological stress returned to a state of
relaxation more quickly when they lay in a

room bathed in blue light
The idea was that blue light can have an effect on people’s state of mind. One study in 2017 backed
up this notion; it showed that people who had experienced psychological stress returned more quickly
to a state of relaxation when they lay in a room bathed in blue light.
Michiko Ueda at Waseda University heard about the railway companies’ experiments on station
platforms and was told the lamps had proved to be a success. Ueda has studied a huge range of
factors that may be influencing Japan’s suicide rate – from economics to natural disasters and even
discussion of celebrity suicides on Twitter. But she says her first reaction to the railway companies’
claims was scepticism. “I thought we should follow up and I decided to contact the railway company to
ask if they could provide data,” she explains.
The blue lights were installed on all 29 stations of the Tokyo Loop (Yamanote) Line in 2008 (Credit: Damon
Coulter)
After analysing 10 years’ worth of data on suicides at 71 Japanese train stations, Ueda and her
colleagues found that there was some evidence of an effect on passengers. They saw an 84%
reduction, a figure that was soon widely reported.
Unfortunately, that’s not the whole story. When news reports about the findings came out, Masao
Ichikawa at the University of Tsukuba took another look at the data. He pointed out that it was
important to distinguish between data collected during the day and night at outdoor train stations.
During the day, the lights may be easily missed, or even turned off.
Ichikawa also scrutinised a measure known as the “confidence interval”. Statistical analyses always
carry an inherent uncertainty around a particular result – such as the size of this effect – and the
confidence interval expresses the possible range of those values. Ichikawa noticed that the confidence
in in Ueda’s paper was extremely wide: 14-97%. “Statistically very unstable,” he says. This means the
actual effect could have been as low as a 14% reduction – still a significant change, but not nearly as
big as the media coverage had suggested.
He hoped his own paper, published in response the following year, would ensure that people didn’t
begin thinking that blue lights were a miracle deterrent – that they somehow had an extraordinary
effect on people who were considering suicide.
The installation of protective barriers and screen doors along the edges of platforms could be far more
useful, says Ichikawa. However, he acknowledges that they cost a lot more than blue lights. The
expense may be worth it, though, if the blue light effect turns out to be minimal.
Since publishing her paper, Ueda has been stunned by the number of enquiries she gets from railway
firms around the world, including Switzerland, Belgium and the UK. “It’s amazing,” she says. There are
already at least two examples of blue light installations in Britain – one at a train crossing in
Scotland, and there are also such lights at Gatwick airport train station.
The scientific evidence that blue light really can reduce the rate of suicide is mixed, and the true effect is probably
smaller than often reported (Credit: Damon Coulter)
But Ueda is no proponent of the schemes. “Whenever somebody asks me whether they should do
blue lights or platform screen doors, I will immediately answer, ‘You should do platform screen doors’,”
she says.
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– and we still don’t know exactly what impact the lights are
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aware, thus changing their behaviour, suggests Ueda. And
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psychological impact of blue lights, but there are already
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The 'cathedral' protecting Tokyo conflicting results on that point from other teams. The 2017
from floods paper mentioned above gave credence to the idea that blue
lights could be calming, but Stephen Westland, an expert
in colour and design at the University of Leeds, says the lights may not influence another important
factor – someone’s impulsiveness.
Experiments carried out by his former PhD student Nicolas Ciccone found that, although
participants reported that they felt more or less impulsive depending on the colour of light illuminating a
room they were in, behavioural and neurological measurements didn’t suggest any deeper effect.
One experiment involved assessing risk-taking behaviour by asking participants to pump up a virtual
balloon by clicking a button. They were promised a cash reward should they be able to avoid bursting
the balloon. “Each pump carries greater risk, but also greater potential reward,” the paper notes.
Even if blue light does reduce the risk of suicide, platform screen doors will be a more effective way of protecting
vulnerable passengers (Credit: Alamy)
“We didn’t really get any evidence that I can put my hand on my heart and say blue light or red light
makes you more impulsive,” explains Westland. And although light therapy is established as a
treatment for seasonal affective disorder (SAD), it does not necessarily follow that changes in
mood of this order would influence a suicide attempt.
“There’s no necessary link to any actions you might take,” he says.
All of this is not to berate people for hoping that innovative ways of tackling Japan’s suicide problem
can be found. After all, the nation is among the top 20 in the world in terms of suicide rate – a
problem that many in the country are seriously wrestling with and trying to redress.
The overall number of suicides has fallen in recent years, down to about 21,000 in 2017 from 34,500
in 2003, but the number has been rising in among young people.
“It’s difficult to describe it, it’s very sad,” says Ichikawa.
Blue lights may have an effect on people contemplating suicide, but, to date, science actually gives
somewhat inconclusive results. As Ueda herself says, “I really don’t want people to think that blue
lights are the solution.
“To repeat, people should use multiple measures and platform screen doors are probably the most
effective one.”
--
To find someone to talk to about mental health, please

visit www.befrienders.org/directory. The International Association for Suicide Prevention has a
list of global agencies that may also be able to provide immediate support.
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BBC - Future - The Global Internet Is Disintegrating. What Comes Next

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5/16/2019 BBC - Future - The global internet is disintegrating. What comes next?

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