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The internet was once viewed as a utopia (xã hội không tưởng) where everyone was free to say whatever they liked, with only 'bad' countries regulating what was uploaded. Yet now from New Delhi to New York, leaders seem to be following Beijing's lead.

In the words of CNN, “India is building its own internet” or, more accurately, its own nationally focused applications and social media ecosystem. There’s a myriad of reasons as to why. First of all, following clashes between government forces and protesting farmers over the past few months, Indian authorities have increasingly clashed with American social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter, demanding they censor activist accounts on their networks. The government ended up shutting down the internet entirely in certain areas to try and curb the unrest (náo động). Then secondly, the border skirmish (đụng độ quân sự ở biên giới) with China has also seen India ban hundreds of Chinese apps, including the international sensation TikTok.

Irrespective of the target country, the motivations are the same: India wants national sovereignty (chủ quyền quốc gia) over its internet. Just such a position is held, somewhat ironically (nghịch lý, ngược đời), by Beijing itself, which has previously called it “cyber sovereignty" (chủ quyền không gian mạng)– the idea that the internet within a certain country is not a liberal-free-for-all Wild West, as many have previously understood it, but is in fact subject to national laws (luật pháp quốc gia) and sovereignty. This has usually been associated with authoritarianism (chủ nghĩa độc tài) and censorship (kiểm duyệt); hence its creation by China. However, as we can see by India’s embrace of the concept, the world’s attitude to the internet is changing. As geopolitics (địa chính trị) reconfigures itself and aspects of ‘globalization’ come under scrutiny, the dream of the internet as a libertarian ideal is closing down not just in the East, but in the West too.

...Yet, in 2021, the concept of ‘national sovereignty’ over the internet is expanding from what was once condemned as an authoritarian idea into something widely used and supported. This sea-change in attitude can be pinned down to a single year: 2016. This was the year that populism and anti-globalization, most famously exemplified by Brexit and Trump, broke into the mainstream and revealed to the Western political class that the internet and social media were not a linear force of one-way enlightenment. The reality was far more anarchic and provided the chance for ‘false’ ideas and ‘misinformation’ to be propagated on an industrial scale, as well as to give power to political movements that could challenge the ruling establishments that had previously been able to be kept at bay.

The internet represents openness, but that openness was always in fact conditional on political security and confidence, as opposed to an ideological matter of principle. In reality it was never really as simple as “bad countries hiding the truth”, as it was fear of the internet’s ramifications (phân nhánh). China understood that first, and now the West’s sense of confidence and security about the free internet is also evaporating.