The Eventual Split of the Big "I" Internet

Too Long; Didn't Read: A man's ramblings about the future of the Internet and how the World Wide Web will eventually become the Nation Wide Web.

That, by itself is a very spooky thing, but that is beside the point of these ramblings.

We call it the Internet (upper-case I) because of the fact that there is one single instance of it in the entire world that we use every single day to connect to other people through the World Wide Web. Calling it internet would be grammatically incorrect, however, soon we will probably have to adjust to the fact that these lower-case i internets will appear in the future.

Most people are aware of China's strong grasp on what its population is allowed to see, hear and speak about; censorship is some of the best tools a regime could possibly have in order to have its people subdued and ignore certain interim government-related issues, while also using it as a way to rile people up against other competing nations.

The Internet complicates things a lot for dictatorships, it is a network with vast amounts of information coming from other nations with different perspectives which may or may not hold something that a regime will find inappropriate for its citizens to know. They may attempt to block the content by blocking an ISP's ability to reach the page, and maybe even block an entire range of IP's to properly get rid of such information if it has been mirrored by other websites.

China's solution to this problem is to block itself out of the Internet through its Great Firewall; a conjunction of legal, technological and security measures to prevent any sort of outside information from being sent or received through the Internet, and instead, create a localized network that is monitored by the Chinese Government, which can track down political dissent and swiftly remove it from any of the contained social medias in this network. (Like Weibo).

We can see a similar thing happening happening in Russia already (Roskomnadzor), and other countries are getting in on the fun (Turkey, Egypt, Iran). This sets a very grim precedent for us users of the Internet who have friends and family out in other countries. What if more countries decide to create their own internet?

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