We are entering a new era of the web that analysts and industry experts have already dubbed "Splinternet".
Splinternet is, in fact, the fragmentation of the Internet into many specific networks by state and by region. A bit like saying that every country will have its own internet. A bit like putting boundaries on a world that doesn't have any today.
Why is it happening?
It is the effect of the desire that each state has to maintain "sovereignty" also on the digital level: those on purchasing choices, privacy, localization of citizens they are information considered evidently sensitive and not shareable.
Already today more than 30 world areas have imposed stakes on the web: Europe, Brazil, China, India. Never have so many blocked external access to their data online, and the process does not do than to increase.
It's not bad news just for freedom of thought and speech: trade is also in serious danger, and to avoid problems companies will have to go through a complicated transition.
The fact is, every nation has rules, and Splinternet will be no exception: not adapting will mean many cases to be cut off from any distribution channel For their own products and services. As if that weren't enough, various sanctions and duties will erode 0.5% to 4% of annual turnover.
It is the new Cold War
The victims of this showdown that involves more and more countries are always many, the majority part of which "crashed" against the telematic and administrative barriers of the "Great Chinese Firewall", the new IT wall created by the government.
With the passing of its Cybersecurity Law, the country has embraced a vision of the network diametrically opposed to what we have been used to up to now, forcing other countries to protect themselves in a similar way: Europe has echoed it with the GDPR, and also Brazil has strengthened privacy measures with his law, the Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGPD) .
Goodbye free trade?
Free Internet it will be a dream nostalgic, in short. Open access to information, and its free circulation between countries, citizens and organizations will become a memory faded.
Can we still do something?
Currently little or nothing. The United States, founders and pioneers of the web, is a country in which several important voices (in society and digital entrepreneurship) staunchly defend, maybe already resigned, the ideal of a free network: with a big one and recent defection, that of Mark Zuckerberg who it seems to have happened bent on the need for survival his platform.
Others are more determined, like (noblesse oblige) the creator himself of the web, that Tim Berners-Lee who developed a “Contract for the Web” full of ethical principles, and which is hoped for a rapid "disarmament" of the global scenario closing.
Perhaps the future will truly be characterized by unbridgeable distances even on the floor technical, or maybe it's just a "reactionary" phase: tied up in the complex dynamics of violations and sanctions, the various nations could return on their steps.
