The global battle for the internet is just starting. By John Harris
... think about the
giant swath of humanity that now uses the internet, and consider one of the
most basic facets of how 4 billion of us live our lives. This is a 21st-century
story, but it will ring bells with people old enough to remember the cold war:
how people understand their own experience and events in the wider world is
increasingly decided by the version of the internet they use.
On one side sits the
system used in China, which produces vast amounts of personal data and blurs into a huge apparatus
of state surveillance and censorship. This model is centred on two online
behemoths, whose dominance partly comes down to the fact that Chinese
consumerism is all about paying via your smartphone, rather than an
old-fashioned plastic card. There’s the e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba, and
Tencent, which owns WeChat, the platform used by more than 1 billion people every day. It does so many things – payments, social networking, messaging,
travel booking, gaming – that participating in society without it seems all but
impossible.
On the other side of
the modern digital divide is the version of the internet pioneered in the west
and now spreading around the planet, which revolves around Google and Facebook.
These giants also feast on a mountain of personal information, but present themselves
as a contrasting embodiment of personal freedom and liberal values, even as
they embed the social model now known as surveillance capitalism... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/25/cold-war-digital-china-facebook-mark-zuckerberg
