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China The Internet United States

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Predicts the Internet Will Split in Two By 2028 -- and One Part Will Be Led By China (yahoo.com) 178

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Speaking at a private event in San Francisco this week, Eric Schmidt said he believes within the next decade there will be two distinct internets: one led by the U.S. and the other by China. At the event, economist Tyler Cowen asked, "What are the chances that the internet fragments over the years?" To which former Google CEO said: I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America. If you look at China, and I was just there, the scale of the companies that are being built, the services being built, the wealth that is being created is phenomenal. Chinese Internet is a greater percentage of the GDP of China, which is a big number, than the same percentage of the US, which is also a big number. If you think of China as like 'Oh yeah, they're good with the Internet,' you're missing the point.

Globalization means that they get to play too. I think you're going to see fantastic leadership in products and services from China. There's a real danger that along with those products and services comes a different leadership regime from government, with censorship, controls, etc. Look at the way BRI works -- their Belt and Road Initiative, which involves 60-ish countries -- it's perfectly possible those countries will begin to take on the infrastructure that China has with some loss of freedom.
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Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Predicts the Internet Will Split in Two By 2028 -- and One Part Will Be Led By China More

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Predicts the Internet Will Split in Two By 2028 -- and One Part Will Be Led By China

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  • How big we'll likely never know since China's government statistics are about as reliable as their Happy Meal toys.

  • Web 3.0 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pecosdave ( 536896 ) on Friday September 21, 2018 @10:08AM (#57354140) Homepage Journal

    In a decade you won't even have to be on the "web proper" to be networked in.

    Once you get proper Web 3.0 decentralized networks running - like the Akasha beta [akasha.world] you don't need web proper. All you need to be is attached to another node, even without web-proper access and you can communicate anywhere. I hope to see neighborhood mesh networks be it WiFi or cable-over-the-fence networks, as long as you've got a machine or two somewhere connected to the web then you've got worldwide communication going. Once we figure out how to make IPFS [ipfs.io] have some reasonable naming systems the old-school web will matter less and less.

    • If you can reach out to another host, then you're on a network.
      If you can reach out to a host not on your network, then you're reaching to a different network.
      This means the separate networks are interconnected. An "internet" if you will.
      You may need to find a way to route data around.

      The "web" is nothing more than the internet + a way to discover and navigate hosts and services.

      • Of course I recognize that.

        The Internet as we know it is pretty well thought out and purposefully built. Once you start getting into IPFS and block-chain peer to peer land you legitimately have and option to network with peer to peer chaos. No need for DNS, theoretically you could have hosts not running TCP/IP participating and huge chunks could be offline at any given time and the chaos still manages to work.

        The difference:
        Web-proper - managed under authority with the ability of individuals and organizat

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nasch ( 598556 )

      What do you do if you want a low latency connection?

      • Then you go ahead and get onto spy-net instead of the wild-wild-web. OR depending on the situation you run your own fiber or private tunnel.

  • BRI itself is fragmenting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Friday September 21, 2018 @10:12AM (#57354146)

    The whole Belt and Road initiative is running into some problems [bloomberg.com], receiving a lot of pushback from many countries that are realizing it's no picnic to be controlled by China.

  • ... hit you in the ass on the way to your fully firewalled future. They are 90% there already. This reminds me. We geeks need to find some type of new network outside of the corporate internet. The wingtips have mostly ruined it and turned it into a giant strip mall. However, say for example there was a grassroots nationwide wifi network, the FCC would come along and ban it. That or the wingtips would figure out how to buy it and ruin that, too. Ugh. It's hard to escape the suit weasels.

  • We should cut off China, and all other evil dictatorships, from the internet now. If they can't stop murdering people that disagree with them, they do not deserve to be part of the civilized world.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      America too. If it can't stop murdering people of color, and punishing asylum seekers by torturing their children, it shouldn't be on the Internet.

      Or... hear me out here... maybe your idea is fucking stupid and that cutting China off from a resource that provides more freedom to its citizens while giving the government jack shit isn't a bad thing.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      To be fair, despite not being an evil dictatorships the US has manager to murder plenty of people who disagree with them all over the world. Would the US murder less people if they were "cut off" from the Internet? Doubtful.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by kiviQr ( 3443687 )
      You would cut off also people. Why do you want to puhish them for their goverment. Do reverse - free education via internet - will widen their horizons and give them motivation to change something.

      • Why do you want to puhish them for their goverment. Do reverse - free education via internet

        And when they set up illegal pirate networks to access that content, they get to go to jail. It seems you don't understand how it actually works under a government like China's.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Myrdos ( 5031049 )
        How can you do that when they self-censor their internet?

    • Re: Do it now (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Err, they have already done on their own. (Try accessing content outside of China when you're there.)

      Problem is the majority of Chinese people don't care. Their version of the internet revolves around talking to loved ones and buying all sorts of stuff -from rice to airtickets- over WeChat, or watching Game of Thrones, legally, on the internet (except that they prefer their locally produced shows these days). In a sense, they are living actual life.

      In contrast, western people use the internet to shit post a

      • That is a good point. In a lot of ways the Chinese internet is better for them. The only stores available are Chinese; fine, and no pesky trademarks to worry about, so copycat goods are plentiful and cheap. The only social media available is Chinese; fine, that is where their friends are. Copyright doesn't exist, download whatever content you want, for free, nobody cares.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bongo ( 13261 )

      I gather that at one time, China had the technology to sail the world, but they figured the rest of the world was just primitive barbarians, so they didn't bother.

      From a Chinese perspective, China is the world.

      To paraphrase the old soviet joke, in Chinese world, world is cut off by China.

      • In reality China explored & traded as far west as Egypt and Ethiopia. They met Buddhists and Muslims, and carried their belief systems back home.

  • When it pops it’s Japan’s lost decade times 10. All the garbage real estate. All the rich owning 10 apartments while 90% own nothing. All the shit build quality. My wife is chinese, I’ve been to lower tier cities where I’m the only white guy in 100 miles. There is some really shocking shit there.

  • Given America's paranoid track record (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I fear for the worst. There's a lot of flippant accusations about surveilance and censorship of the rest of the world in the Chinese internet, but more than anything it's about keeping America's slimy, spying, sabotaging tentacles out of there, which is sensible.

    The problem with America is that they're growing increasingly paranoid and consider all the other countries to be enemies, and have even committed hostile actions, subversion and sabotage against European networks, of everything. Chine on the other

  • a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America.

    I can't see that happening as all the equipment used to connect to the internet comes from China. If they make it, they can hard-wire it to work with whatever version of the intenet they please. It is the tech / manufacturing equivalent of having the intenet by the balls. I must assume that when the times comes that the chinese want to assume authority of the intenet, they will just take it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JustNiz ( 692889 )

      Sure the manufacturing is done in China (just because its cheap) but in many cases the internet equipment companies themselves are actually American and European.

  • China wants to exclude itself from the internet and have essentially its own version of the internet where everything their politicians disagree with is deleted --- that's not splitting the internet though: that's islanding China from the rest of the world: that's damage. As we well know, the Internet wants to re-route around such damage.

  • Meh (Score:3)

    by jbmartin6 ( 1232050 ) on Friday September 21, 2018 @10:54AM (#57354326)
    There's nothing in here about the Internet "splitting". All it amounts to is that China is already using the Internet a lot and most Americans know nothing about it because they can't read Chinese. They are going to use their own sites and services instead of running to use companies like Google.

  • If you think of China as like 'Oh yeah, they're not a Nazi super-state so it's okay to trade with them,' you're missing the point.

  • The core premise of this commentary seems to be that China hasn't basically already created the theorized divide between their "internet" and the rest of the world. I'm not so sure that people operating from behind The Great Firewall would entirely agree with that premise.

  • Mostly because those that can influence it pretty much want the Chinese Variant of the Internet, a network, controlled by the government and built for the benefit of the industry.

    • Uh, if you think that industry wants the controls that CHina has in place, could only mean that you are either not working in industry, or you work for the Chinese gov. The Chinese controlled internet was NOT built for industry. There, the gov is picking winners/losers, of which the ONLY none-Chinese winners are short-lived. Once a Chinese company starts competing, then Chinese gov interferes with the none-Chinese company and makes sure that sales drop. If not, they find a reason to block them.

      • If I, like the corporations in the "free" world, control the government then yes, I do want the government to pick the winners and losers.

        • exactly.
          Does industry control the Chinese gov? IOW, is the Chinese Communist party controlled by industry?
  • It is expensive to build brick/mortar from which to sell. OTOH, selling via internet is dirt cheap. The west is still locked into mentality that distributors and/or box stores are main sources. IOW, we are throwing our money away on middle men. Then add in the fact that china pays less to mail small items to most other nations, than a developed nation pays to mail in their own city. China will want control as trump/GOP try to stop china from being unfair, but offhand, I think trump is being just as unfair

  • Looking at the activity logs of my servers that have public IPv4 addresses, all the traffic I get already from China is spam, bot scans of web pages, and constant port scanning and SSH dictionary attacks.

    On top of that, I am pretty much 100% certain that if I put up a web page of interest to Chinese in China and it got popular and the government of China didn't like then nobody there would be able to see it anymore.

    If the Internet did bifurcate as Schmidt says, what would be so different?

  • China has many, many problems it is facing.
    More problems than the US.

    For as much power, wealth and influence they have at the moment, their window of opportunity for world domination, eg, "The Chinese Century" is rapidly closing and they know it.

    The reason Xi is tightening control is because he knows the people of China are sick of the CCP and the corruption, etc;
    Also, as others have pointed out, the BRI is having problems also. Those who have signed onto it are now seeing the error of their ways

  • Someone can invent a device that connects to BOTH the American Internet and the Chinese Internet, and routes traffic between the two, making them look one one big Internet.

    Gonna be a lot of work though.

  • That would signal the end of the Internet, and begin the era of Walled_Gardens_2p0. Face it, we're almost there right now, globally-speaking.

  • Look, there are other internets.

    Faster ones.

    Able to leap tall Gigabytes in a flash.

    Just saying.

  • There is no such thing as globalization.
    That term would imply that it was a two way street.
    What is often called Globalization is just money and technology going from West to East.

  • Tyler Cowen isn't an economist, simply a Koch brothers paid-stooge.

    Sure, you can call him a pseudo-economist, but please never call him a real economist.
  • That's already happened.

    The Chinese one is called "wechat", and nobody in the West uses it, because the TOS basically say that the Chinese Communist Party owns your soul, as well as all of your personal data and human rights. It's supposed to be super convenient, though. So they say. Has every feature you want. Except privacy.

    The other one is called "the internet", and you can't really access most of it in China, because it's blocked. I mean, there are a few public-internet sites still reachable from C
  • The Chinese government has systematically banned or neutered almost every US website or website company that has won a sizeable chunk of market share in China.

    At the same time, their policy on corporate ownership insures that the companies inside the great firewall are majority owned by the Chinese.

    At the same time, large US companies outside of China are constantly faced by monopoly threats by the US government. They're also prevent from merging to create bigger companies. And they don't have the p

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