When we used to talk about the digital divide, we thought about who had what technology and how they used it. A new book has opened my eyes to yet a new series of dimensions, and these take both a closer look at the technology as well as place it in a different and more complex framework of multi-stakeholder inclusion and governance.
The book is Geopolitics at the Internet’s Core, and it is a most unusual and very helpful effort by four co-authors that have been long involved in shaping technology policy and governance: Fiona M. Alexander and Nanette S. Levinson, who both hold various research positions at American University in Washington DC; Laura DeNardis, a professor at Georgetown University and author of numerous books on tech governance; and Francesca Musiani, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research. I got a copy to review and reading this book made me want to talk to Alexander directly about the inclusion issue. (If you would like to purchase the book, use PALAUT to get a 20% discount.)
But first, let me lay some foundations.
If we look at how IP protocols are distributed across the globe, we’ll see that their DARPA origins are still very much in evidence. There are several of ways to measure this. One is by counting Internet Exchange Points — the places where large ISPs can connect to each other. These are still mostly congregated in western countries, and many countries have either no IXPs or a single place. The absence or paucity of an IXP means that residents of that country will have longer latencies, less local content and higher cost of internet access.
There is also measuring the number of available IP address ranges available in any given locality. We know that the IPv4 “classic” address ranges have been mostly consumed, but in Africa there are still many available address ranges.
And then there are the distribution of DNS servers, because having one logically “nearby” also effects traffic latency and resiliency of digital networks. It took until 2022 before Africa had its own managed DNS cluster, meaning that prior to then most of its DNS traffic had to transit to another continent.
If we move our lens to a wider angle to examine the actual languages used online, we see that English dominates, and despite there being thousands of different languages spoken and written, 82% of online content is represented by ten languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, German, French and Malaysian. For much of the internet’s early years, non-ASCII domain names weren’t supported, and today there are still gaps in having local character set support.
Let’s move our lens to a still wider angle to internet governance. This is also instructive in showing the unequal distribution of these resources. The various standards bodies that determine internet policy still have a very western bias. And as conflicts spread to the TCP/IP space — such as one country asking to terminate access into another country, who is serving on these bodies can be significant. This is not a new problem.
Geoff Huston, who works for the Asia Pacific Network Information Center, is a keen observer of these and other issues. “The problem is that the distribution of this digital wealth is very uneven, and while a small clique of individuals may live in an extreme level of opulence, large proportions of domestic populations are disenfranchised and marginalized. Having valuable digital enterprises domiciled in a nation does not translate to widespread economic prosperity. It’s extremely challenging to espouse the benefits of an open multi-stakeholder global communications environment when the dream has been so basely corrupted by the exploitative excesses of the small clique of digital megaliths.” He is of course referring to the major US online companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
These and other issues were part of a chapter of the Geopolitics book. This chapter is devoted to the role of the internet ecosystem to become more inclusive and involve multiple stakeholders in developing technical standards and to be adopted and supported across multiple geographies and cultures. The authors write that “the intersections of the internet with governing bodies are neither hierarchical nor linear. Thus, approaches to inclusion should involve models that complement the kaleidoscopic design of IP and reflect its very nature.”
I spoke to Alexander about her book and her role in shaping US and internet policy over her 20-year government career. “The internet has been a resounding economic success, but what is needed now is a more holistic assessment of policies to forge a path forward,” she said. “There is no singular multi-stakeholder approach — it is the tool and not an outcome, and it works best when more people and more transparency are involved.” She relishes her early years when she worked for the Clinton administration and wishes that we could have more opportunities for bringing the right people from around the world to debate these future policy choices. “Not everyone sees that, but hopefully it will happen. I remain an optimist.”
Huston fears that various national pressures might drive us away from inclusive gains of the recent past. “Maybe it’s the broader challenges of our enthusiastic adoption of computing and communications that have formed a propulsive force for widespread social dislocation in today’s world,” he says.
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The names Sergey Lebedev and Victor Glushkov may not mean anything to most of us, but both were the key developers of electronic computers in the early days in Ukraine. When room-sized computers were being built in numerous labs in the US and UK, the other side of the Iron Curtain had a lot of challenges. For one thing, these scientists couldn’t read Western journals that described their operation without special permission from Communist Party elders. Getting parts was an issue too. And the party continued to not understand the steps needed to construct the machine, and continually blocked the scientists’ efforts.