Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/25/cold-war-digital-china-facebook-mark-zuckerberg
The global battle for the internet is just starting
by John Harris, The Guardian, Mon 25 Mar 2019.
Two competing visions of our digital future have emerged from China and
Silicon Valley. But are they really so different?
If only for a moment, set aside the comparatively parochial drama of
Brexit, 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.
One of the central questions of our age is which model will become
pre-eminent, not least among the half of humanity who are not yet
online. With Donald Trump’s trade war providing a crude kind of mood
music, the battle so far is not quite as simple as Chinese platforms
duking it out with their US counterparts: the tech clash has been more
visible in tensions over nuts-and-bolts infrastructure, particularly
when it comes to the activities of the IT giant Huawei.
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But look at high levels of tech investment by China in India and Africa,
the prospect of Alibaba butting heads with Amazon, or the international
competition between Uber and its Chinese equivalent Didi, and you get a
flavour of the future – particularly when it comes to China’s mastery of
mobile payment systems, which leaves most western countries standing.
Across the world, geopolitics is fast boiling down to whether China or
the US is the most influential tech player.
Meanwhile, the dominance of life in the west by corporations based in
the US is being contested as never before. The Democratic presidential
hopeful Elizabeth Warren says she wants Facebook, Google and Amazon to
be broken up. The same sentiments are rising among more switched-on
elements in Congress. As evidenced by the so-called right to be
forgotten, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and such
actions as the €1.5bn fine the European commission imposed last week on
Google (for forcing customers to agree not to accept adverts from other
search engines), the EU is much further ahead. If our current stereotype
of legislators and regulators boils down to grey-haired men who barely
understand how to switch their phones on, that is clearly changing fast.
The new cold war and the race to regulate are the contexts in which we
have to understand everything that western big tech now does – something
that applies particularly to the Facebook founder and CEO, Mark
Zuckerberg. Ten years ago, he professed to believe in an ideal he called
“radical transparency”, and “the concept that the world will be better
if you share more”.
Now, panicked by his company’s seemingly endless fall from grace, he
says he is pursuing “a privacy-based vision for social networking”.
Logically, the two ideas cancel each other out, revealing something much
more prosaic: the sense that he is desperately trying to escape the
clutches of his potential regulators, so that Facebook remains at the
core of the western internet, ready to be endlessly pushed into new
global markets.
Just over two weeks ago Zuckerberg put up a long post that announced his
intention to develop a “privacy-focused communications platform [that]
will become even more important than today’s open platforms”, based on
message encryption, and the idea – copied from Snapchat – of content
deleting itself, so as not to come back to haunt the people who post it.
But what actually matters is that he wants to combine the messaging
services offered by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which will surely
make any attempt to break these entities up all the more difficult.
For the foreseeable future, old-style Facebook will carry on. Meanwhile,
on their new platform, Zuckerberg and his colleagues are likely to still
amass huge amounts of metadata (who we talk to and for how long, and
where we are), while encryption takes the heat off their company’s
absurdly overburdened moderators: as and when its users foment unrest
and abuse, Facebook’s high-ups will be able to deny any agency, and
stand well back. But most eye-watering of all is the sheer reach of
Zuckerberg’s new creation: his plan is to “make it as secure as
possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of
that, including calls, video chats … businesses, payments, commerce, and
ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services”.
This is precisely the WeChat model of an app that does just about
everything, including handling everyday personal finance, thereby
ensuring an endless avalanche of data. What that highlights is not just
the scale of Facebook’s undimmed ambitions and Zuckerberg’s questionable
new embrace of “privacy”, but something that attracts surprisingly
little attention: the sense that even as the eastern and western models
of the internet compete for global influence, they are converging.
Perhaps we should not be that surprised. At the height of the cold war,
for all their mutual animosity, it was fashionable to talk about the US
and Soviet Union as increasingly similar societies, subject to what the
social theorist Herbert Marcuse called “common requirements of
industrialisation”, and both in thrall to bureaucracy and centralised
planning. In the wake of the revolutions of 1989 the basic idea flipped,
so that east and west were said to be heading into a shared future of
liberal democracy and free markets, a vision also projected on to an
increasingly prosperous China, until the arrival of President Xi Jinping
heralded something much more problematic.
Now convergence is here again, but this time it is all about
surveillance, behavioural nudging, and companies so huge that they
intrude on every part of our lives. The danger is the world falling
between two visions that are too close for comfort: on the one hand,
surveillance and censorship perpetrated by companies in brazen cahoots
with authoritarian states; on the other, all-seeing tech corporations
whose ties to government remain shadowy and opaque, which is part of
what Edward Snowden came forward to tell us.
Legislators, regulators, developers and entrepreneurs should take note:
if 21st-century democracy and the most basic ideas of citizenship are to
mean anything, the western internet ought not to be converging with
China’s, but pulling in the opposite direction.
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