More than quarter of a century ago, immediately after the end of the cold war era, Francis Fukuyama’s influential essay declared the “End of History” announcing the fall of ideologies, establishing the triumph of liberal democracies as an apotheosis (Fukuyama, 1989). Similarly, the concept of a “Flat World”, with democratization of knowledge and free-flow of information through internet and advances in globalization at the beginning of the 21st century (Friedman, 2006), formed the basis for the 2014 lecture by Daniel Bethlehem on the “End of Geography” showing the challenges posed on the centrality of territorial integrity and sovereignty rooted in the Westphalian legal order within International Relations (Bethlehem, 2014).

Thanks to technology and the openness of cyberspace, state-based nationalism rooted in territory, language, culture, and history are threatened by the citizens’ rush to form and join virtual communities based on shared interests and ideologies. Increasingly, states have started asserting their control on the physical telecommunications infrastructure by filtering, blocking, monitoring, and policing of information flow within its territory from all or parts of the external global network. This is in a way justifiable and expected as the father of international liberalism Immanuel Kant concedes that “states are motivated first and foremost by self-preservation” (Kant & Humphrey, 1983).

Nonrivalrousness and nonexcludability principles associated with knowledge and cyberspace as a concept make internet a public good. With no national or any such territorial limit with open and universal access to almost unlimited information, internet can also be categorized as a global public good, a truly virtual and virtuous public good (Spar, 1999). Internet as an entity created and prospered in the United States, the American commitment to freedom of expression has been exported as the default option to other nations. The anonymous and pseudonymous expression of ideas and thoughts, often not tolerated in offline avenues, are social norms in the online setting. However, many states’ national interest and international mistrust prompt them to disallow internet resources in the name of copyright violation, extremist propaganda, call for unrest, indecent content, and hate speech. A study by OpenNet Initiative in 2010 shows that over a third of all internet users experience some form of filtering of information (York, 2010). Short of completely shutting down the internet, states are exploring ways to exerting control on domestic information consumption.

Recent international outcries and debates on cyber governance have been triggered by the Snowden revelations on NSA tracking, and the pending expiration of a key contract the US Department of Commerce has with an autonomous non-profit private entity called “ICANN” that currently administers all resource allocation and coordination of information routing on the internet (Gross, 2014). Countries are calling for a change to the current multi-stakeholder governance model of internet to replace it with stronger role of multi-lateral institutions such as UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

There is merit for an internationally accepted cyber governance regime to avoid a lot of privately administered governance systems enforced at both platform and application level, in the form of privacy policies on Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, etc. The internet service and application providers enforce their own one-sided privacy and security governance on the users as a Faustian Bargain, since most of these services are offered free to the users with the only options to either, accept the conditions and enter, or stay out (DeNardis, 2010). Such privatization of internet governance is inevitably going to call for some kind of eventual government regulation of the internet, which itself will carry a set of unintended consequences such as incompatibility and denial of access to certain information, and can lead to fragmentation of the internet.

China’s Golden Shield project along with the Great Firewall of China, to essentially block, filter, monitor, and intercept information before it enters China's territorial network, is a great example of potential fragmentation of the internet. Many popular web sites such as google, youtube, facebook, twitter and whatsapp are not accessible to the Chinese users. Brazil and Germany want the user data of any eCommerce activity to be stored within the local borders and not on foreign servers. India wants tight censoring and filtering of pornographic content.

Similarly, there are issues with court jurisdictions across borders in the grey boundaries of internet transactions. A federal district court in New York City ordered Microsoft to turn over the entire contents of a Hotmail account hosted in the company’s data center in Ireland, even though the US laws generally do not apply extraterritorially. A court in British Columbia, Canada ordered Google to not index domains that sold counterfeit versions of a company’s products, even though those domains were not in Canada, nor did Google have any operations in British Columbia. The court’s assertion was on the fact that Google had advertisement revenues from companies based in British Columbia. Another case of interest is European Court of Justice’s decision on “right to be forgotten” to de-index any content that is not acceptable to an individual or a company. EU’s judgment forced Google to remove indexed entries from their European domains like google.de and google.fr, but not from google.com, which is still being contested in the courts.

Regardless of the final outcomes in any of the above cases, it is time for the judicial systems around the world’s democracies to carefully rethink the wisdom of setting extraterritorial precedents. International institutions need to establish new norms for such extra territorial cyber disputes. The delay to the enactment of such norms and practices for cyber governance will affect the global internet community as a whole denying them free and unlimited access to knowledge, and protection of their privacy and dignity. It should be noted that the next 5 billion internet users live in more repressive places than many of the current users, and their desire and right to access knowledge should be respected and insured.

The call for an internationally acceptable cyber governance model and the demand for information sovereignty are gaining momentum all across the world including some western nations. Political rights of states to control information flows within their territories to protect their sovereignty, with majority citizens’ support to nationalist views are inevitably going to fragment the internet as we currently know. As Castells (2008) asserts, “not everything or everyone is globalized, but the global networks that structure the planet affect everything and everyone”. Not all information will be universally open and accessible, but filtered half-knowledge (sanitized information) may cause more harm than no-knowledge (ignorance). Hopefully, there will be a point where civil society’s thirst for complete knowledge, without fragmentations preconceived on ideological constrictions, will prevail, leading to the ‘End of both History and Geography’.

References
Bethlehem, D. (2014). The End of Geography: The Changing Nature of the International System and the Challenge to International Law, The European Journal of International Law, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 9-24
Castells, M. (2008). The new public sphere: Global civil society, communication networks, and global governance, The aNNalS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, vol. 616, no. 1, pp. 78-93
DeNardis, L. (2010). The Emerging Field of Internet Governance, Yale Information Society Project Working Paper Series, September, 2010
Friedman, T.L. (2006). The World is Flat [updated and expanded]: The Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century, Macmillan
Fukuyama, F. (1989). The End of History?, The National Interest, 1989 July, no. 1, pp. 3-18
Gross, G. (2014). US Government pulls out of ICANN, PCWorld, March 14, 2014
Kant, I., & Humphrey, T. (1983). Perpetual peace, and other essays on politics, history, and morals, Hackett Publishing
Spar, D.L. (1999). The Public Face of Cyberspace, Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, pp. 344-362
York, J. (2010). More Than Half a Billion Internet Users Are Being Filtered Worldwide, OpenNet Initiative, January 19, 2010

Dijo Alexander is a digitization and cognitive analytics enthusiast. He is a Practitioner Scholar Fellow of Design and Innovation at Weatherhead School of Management in Case Western Reserve University, where he researches big data and digitization strategies for organizations.