Justin Sherman
The government in the Democratic Republic of Congo cut internet and text message services across the country two days in a row last week, as tensions rose ahead of the release of official results from last month’s presidential election. It was just the latest move to restrict internet access by a state with a poor democratic track record, as more countries appear to take their digital cues from the likes of China and Russia.
Last year, Thailand proposed a cybersecurity law that would give the government “sweeping powers” to surveil the internet, censor content and even seize computers “without judicial oversight.” The United Arab Emirates tightened its cybercrime laws by allowing stronger enforcement actions against those inciting acts “deemed” to be against the country’s interest. Egypt similarly gave its judges greater power to censor online content found to threaten “national security.”
Tanzania’s strict new internet law, which gives its Communication Regulatory Authority powers to censor content, are increasingly forcing bloggers offline. Uganda, apparently influenced by Tanzania’s law, enacted a social media tax in 2018 that charges citizens more to access platforms like Twitter or WhatsApp, which mirrors practices in Iran, where foreign websites cost twice as much to access as domestic ones. Turkey expanded the government’s online censorship power. Kazakhstan banned anonymous online comments. Even Israel considered an internet censorship law. And on the first day of 2019, a controversial cybersecurity law went into effect in Vietnam that “puts stringent controls on tech companies operating inside the country” and “censors what its citizens read online.” The country has already claimed that Facebook has violated that law by allowing users to post what Vietnamese authorities call “anti-government” comments and apparently refusing to respond to the government’s requests to censor content.
Last year was an important one for internet governance—the laws and regulations, social norms, technical standards and market pressures that determine how nations and other actors manage the global network. The United Nations adopted a Russia-backed resolution in the General Assembly to fight cybercrime—used as frequent cover for censorship and surveillance in the country—while a group of liberal democracies and a coalition of authoritarian states each proposed their own resolutions for responsible state behavior in cyberspace. Smaller multilateral bodies and institutions also worked to advance norms on and around cyberspace.
Yet it’s not just international institutions that hold critical influence over internet norms. As resurgent authoritarianism spreads around the world, liberal democracies should pay more attention to their own domestic internet policies, and those of their rivals and adversaries. It’s clear that more states are looking to cyberspace to restrict freedoms and assert control, following the model of certain repressive governments.
In today’s world of rising cybersecurity threats and realizations of the internet’s inherent vulnerability, there is a strong incentive for smaller, less powerful nations to look to larger, more powerful nations for how to govern the internet. This is in part because of the internet’s increasingly important role in state power, from warfare and intelligence collection to economic growth.
A free and open internet isn’t exactly an established norm, which is why the U.S. and other like-minded countries must still work to protect it.
That’s why it matters how large powers govern the internet within their own borders. Policymakers in liberal democracies who want to protect a global and open internet—one characterized by free speech and free access to information—must realize that powerful authoritarians are already influencing smaller countries to tighten control over the internet. These authoritarians are pushing a sovereign and controlled internet model—characterized by heavy-handed tactics like content censorship and traffic throttling—more in line with their broader national and strategic interests.
This past year alone, China took stronger steps to police online speech, released its updated agenda for internet control, and censored a wide range of content while also making it more difficult to access foreign websites. In Russia, more recently, federal lawmakers drafted laws to ban online content that criticizes the state and to entirely block search engines that don’t comply with state censorship requests. Another draft law before the State Duma, Russia’s legislature, suggests Moscow may even attempt to build out its own domestic internet, allowing it to manage its own domain name system and internet traffic routing.
This model of a sovereign and controlled internet is spreading, as my colleagues and I charted in a report and data tool that categorizes and rates 193 countries based on their approaches to internet governance. The influence of China and Russia is evident not just from their own scores in our research, but also from the number of nations looking to them as an example for internet governance.
The way powerful nations manage and regulate the internet within their own borders, including the United States and other liberal democracies, is clearly having an impact on smaller states. The repeal of net neutrality under the Trump administration, for instance, will likely harm the norm of a free and open internet that the U.S. has long worked to protect. Some might hold that the repeal isn’t a big deal on the global stage, as the world’s superpowers have long violated international norms when it’s in their own interest. But a free and open internet isn’t exactly an established norm, which is why the U.S. and other like-minded countries must still work to protect it.
Based on our research, there are as many as 50 countries around the world whose internet policies remain undecided. From Argentina and Botswana to Serbia and India, states have not settled on either a global-and-open or a sovereign-and-controlled internet model. This could be an opportunity for the U.S. and other democracies to extend their influence abroad and maintain the principles of a free and open internet by buttressing their own domestic internet policies—rather than lose ground to Russia, China and others and see the internet become increasingly closed and controlled.
“Americans are used to thinking about China primarily as a challenge to U.S. global economic superiority and geopolitical primacy in the Asia-Pacific,” Hal Brands warned in a column for Bloomberg last year. “What’s become clear, though, is that the ideological challenge an authoritarian China poses to democratic governance around the world is also quite serious.” This is true for the model of a more restricted, sovereign internet that is spreading around the world and posing a direct threat to the internet as we know it.
Justin Sherman is a cybersecurity policy fellow at New America, a fellow at the Duke Center on Law & Technology, and a student at Duke University, where he is the co-founder and vice president of the nonpartisan initiative Ethical Tech. He also co-founded and runs the cyber initiative out of the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy
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