“Malcomson’s “Splinternet,” a cyber-realm disintegrating along geopolitical fault lines, isn’t a rupture of the World Wide Web, but rather a pointed reminder of the inescapability of this global condition.”

To read more, visit The Nation.

Scott Malcomson’s recent book Splinternet. How Geopolitics and Commerce are Fragmenting the World Wide Web is a great piece of contemporary history. Its aim is nothing less than to tell the story of the Internet – giving credit both to technology and politics, eccentric individuals and the anarchic cyberspace counter-culture of the 1980s.

To read the rest of the review, visit Netopia.

In some cases, internet sovereignty can mean a state protecting its citizens’ privacy against international corporate surveillance or infiltration by another state. In other cases, it can mean the state ensuring that it can invade the privacy of its citizens whenever and however it likes. The choices made depend on the state, but that of course is the point: it’s the state that decides. Was this inevitable? Perhaps.

To read the rest of the article, visit The Guardian.

The implicit premise of this valuable book is that “we study the past to understand the present; we understand the present to guide the future.” In that light, the book makes a valuable contribution by offering a sound and detailed historical survey of aspects of the Internet which are not well-known nor easily accessible outside the realms of dedicated internet research. However, as explained below, the author has not covered some important aspects of the past and thus the work is incomplete as a guide to the future. This should not be taken as criticism, but as a call for the author, or other scholars, to complete the work.

To read the rest of the review, visit boundary2.

As Scott Malcomson writes in “Splinternet”, an illuminating survey of the past and future of the internet, [the internet] was developed “by the US military to serve US military purposes”. In fact, nearly every technology that makes smartphones so delightful started life as a tool of war. The Washington naval treaty, signed soon after the first world war to limit the size of warships, was silent on the matter of weaponry; that provided the impetus to develop machines capable of the complex mathematical calculations required to aim and fire guns accurately. The attack on Pearl Harbour spurred what would become the first computer with an operating system. The computer screen came from the need for radar-tracking screens.

To read the rest of the review, visit The Economist.

To watch the interview, visit Inc..

One of the big secrets of Silicon Valley in the ’70s and ’80s was that it combined so much money, so much power, so much idealism, so much technical creativity, and a complete ignorance of its own will to power.

To watch the full interview, visit Bloomberg.

I think that as governments increase their dependence on the Internet and networked computers for the projections of force, then they will begin to seek or they are already seeking ways to attack each other’s computers.

[..]

My greatest worry is that as these very nervous militaries of major countries who depend on this technology for major military functions now—such as directing aircraft, directing fire—that their dependence will create a kind of insecurity that will reach a point where they want to strike others’ machines, thinking that they’re only hitting machines, but that this could then trigger a conflict that would involve human bodies as well.

To listen to the full interview, visit WNYC.

The Internet is edging closer to the Splinternet. The leading Republican candidate for U.S. president, Donald Trump, has referred to “closing” the Internet in areas where the U.S. has enemies, while China’s president, Xi Jinping, reasserted, at the second World Internet Conference (WIC) in China last week, that each state has a sovereign right to control what its citizens can and can’t do in cyberspace. The control by a state of “its” Internet has long been advocated by Russia’s government, while the European Union, following an October decision by the European Court of Justice, has released a General Data Protection Regulation that will determine how non-EU companies can market to or monitor EU individuals. That four such distinct political cultures could, for a mix of political, ethical, commercial and security reasons, all reach the same conclusion — that the map of the political world should become the map of cyberspace — suggests that the days of a universal Internet are numbered.

To read the rest of the article, visit The Huffington Post.