Will It Be The US That Breaks Up The Internet?

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said he wants a "clean" Internet by removing Chinese companies, from the domestic Internet and some analysts believe this could break-up the worldwide web. 

The idea is that there's nothing particularly worthwhile keeping the Internet global and for governments that want to control what users see on the Internet ownership for governments makes sense.  The Great Firewall of China is the best example of a nation putting up the Internet equivalent of a wall around itself. You won't find a Google search engine or Facebook in China. What people didn't expect was that the US might follow China's example. 

Mr Pompeo has said he wants to remove "untrusted" applications from US mobile app stores following an Executive Order from the US President for the wildly popular TikTok platform by divested by its Chinese owner. Prof. Alan Woodward, a noted security expert based at the University of Surrey said "This is the Balkanisation of the Internet happening in front of our eyes. "The US government has for a long time criticised other countries for controlling access to the Internet… and now we see the Americans doing the same thing."

The idea of the Internet splitting into two or more versions is a concept that has been discussed for several years, but it has gathered steam in the past 18 months on the back of the escalating trade dispute between the US and China. Historically th US has championed a free Internet, based on the American constitutional tenets of free speech. President Donald Trump's administration has taken a different approach, in part because of the legitimate security concerns that some Chinese companies operating in the US raise. 

President Trump's emerging vision of the US Internet, an Internet intended to be free of Chinese technology, makes it a far more divided place and would appear to be the same policy being pursued by leaders in Russia and China, both of which already place limits on access to foreign content and platforms by their domestic populations.  

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