How the Splinternet is Threatening the Internet

The internet as you know it is under threat from the splinternet!

Geopolitics and the battle over technological standards will cause problems for tech companies and consumers around the world.

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The traditional internet, which allows global communications, is increasingly under threat from the ‘splinternet’,

The splinternet is the fragmentation of the internet into separate technospheres supporting competing visions of how technology standards and regulations should be implemented and geopolitical conflicts around internet architecture.

For example, following the start of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict in February 2022, Russia erected digital barricades, widening the gulf between competing digital spheres

Competing visions from nation-states for internet governance risk hindering the development of international governance across various digital segments, from cyberspace to internet infrastructure, to emerging technologies.

The costs of internet fragmentation are both economic and social. Digital fences across jurisdictions risk creating barriers for companies with global operations.

Divergent regulation and compliance requirements create entry barriers for businesses and raise costs for both corporates and end users

There are four main types of technosphere: open model, normative model, authoritarian model, and hybrid model:

The gulf between these technospheres has only widened in recent decades, driven by geopolitical and trade tensions

Technology standards have become a major twenty-first-century geopolitical battleground, especially between the US and China.

This, in turn, is driving global fragmentation as both countries are focused on reducing supply chain vulnerabilities and boosting their competitiveness in critical technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G.

The next-generation network's standards are at the center of a fierce battle between the US and China. China has filed almost 30,000 5G patent publications in the last three years, well above the 11,000 filed in the US.