Lengthy Op-Ed by Akash Kapur. Paywall but first time visitors should be fine. If in trouble ask me for the text. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/can-the-internet-be-governed Will the Internet harden into an oligarchic playground, or will it become
the tamer (and perhaps less innovative) place envisioned by European regulators, something akin to a digital public utility? Will large sections of it eventually bend to the power of tyrants and illiberal populists, determined to stamp out what Xi Jinping has castigated as the network’s “hidden negative energy”? Or will the more consequential influence be the model that India is pioneering, a walled garden in which private enterprise is allowed to flourish, but within confines established by the state?
The answer may at least partly lie in how—and where—the Internet is being
used. In 1996, when Barlow wrote his manifesto, there were some eighty million Internet users around the world, eighty per cent of whom lived in North America and Europe. Today, there are more than five billion people on the Internet, roughly two-thirds of them from countries in the Global South. India and China now account for about half the world’s mobile-data traffic; the fastest-growing population of users is in Africa. The Internet remains a work in progress. But there’s reason to think that its future is being written in a very different place than its past was.
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