Category: Leon Eckert

These two articles do a really good job of contextualizing the internet from a global viewpoint and as an ever changing entity. Too many people take the internet for granted — see it as something completely free and something which will exist forever, but these articles do a good job of showing the contrary. Despite the ethereal nature of the internet, the internet is very much a man-made object. If we are not careful, we could lose the whole internet to the clutches of the greedy internet service providers of the world.

Another thing that this article made me think more about is the issue of the firewall in China. While the internet is completely unrestricted in most parts of the world, the People’s Republic of China censors major parts of the internet. It is one of the most difficult things about living in China and it is honestly the bane of my existence. Another very interesting thing is the effect that the firewall has had on the Chinese people. Through having a conversation with the average Chinese person, it is very evident that the firewall has restricted their knowledge to only things that the Chinese government wants them to know and that is a direct contradiction to the very principles on which the internet was founded. As the government makes the firewall larger and stronger, one can watch the freedom of the internet dwindle away before their very eyes and that’s a very, very scary thing.

Tim Berners-Lee defends principles of the web in his article “Long Live the Web.” He says that the Web is critical to free speech as a medium which is based on egalitarian principles. Berners-Lee mentions that universality, decentralization, open standards should be the principles and features of the Web in order to make itself powerful enough. The threat to these principles, includes the increasing tendency of internet censorship, consumerism, and the dictatorship of technology giants. What Berners-Lee mentions about the Web is quite cogent, but it would be more interesting to present his ideas in the Chinese context. Even though the Web could exhibit democratic values, the authorities treat it in a different way. The Web media, however, should be the mouthpiece of the Party and lead the public opinion, says CPC News. The threat of the universality principle is shown in the Chinese landscape as well. Berners-Lee mentions that it is dangerous to see “one search engine . . . gets so big that it becomes a monopoly” (82). In 2016, Wei died from cancer after he’s getting medical treatment from a hospital where he had found to be listed the top in the search result of Baidu.com, the biggest Chinese web searching engine, and it caused a social panic. It was found that the reason why that hospital would be listed top was that Baidu treated it as a commercial advertisement.

Ingrid Burrington discovers the geopolitics of the “cloud” in his article “The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud.” Although technological and climate concerns are part of the considerations to build “data centers,” political concerns also need to be considered given the increasing call of data sovereignty. In the Chinese context, this article reminds me of the news on the data center of Apple in China. In 2020, a new data center will be open in Guizhou Province to dedicating itself as a holder of iCloud data for Chinese mainland users, according to Xinhua News. Although Guizhou province is not a technologically advanced or talent-attracting place to build a data center, the Chinese data of iCloud are to be saved here mostly because of political concerns.