Born in the United States, the network of networks was

developed in research structures supported by the Department

of Defense and then in universities in a contributory and

collaborative mode, without any real rules or regulatory body.

Quickly, however, things had to be organized from a technical

standpoint, and organizations such as ICANN* helped

coordinate the allocation of domain names and IP addresses.

Other national or international bodies and working groups such

as ISOC*, IAB*, IRTF*, IETF*, IGF* or ITU*... participated in the

creation of protocols and technical standards essential to the

coherent development of the network. These organizations

bring together many actors such as technical communities,

researchers, government representatives, national or

international organizations, civil society actors or private sector

companies... a multitude of stakeholders who have shaped the

architecture and operation of the network but which do not

make up a true “Internet government”.

(*: See box opposite)

Everything has to go through infrastructure

We tend to forget it in the universe of the intangible, but the

Internet is above all approximately 750,000 miles (1.2 million

kilometers) of submarine cables (95% of world

communications), antennas, routers and servers... so much very

actual infrastructure easy to control, a priori. And some States

do not deprive themselves of it. Under the pretext of

maintaining public order when confronted with protest

campaigns carried out on social networks, countries such as

Tunisia, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and many others have been

led to temporarily cut network access. In Cameroon, for

example, President Paul Biya cut the Internet for almost 6

months in 2017... Other states choose to limit Internet access

to only their national territory. Thus, in Iran since 2021, national

sites hosted abroad have been forced to relocate, allowing the

authorities to access servers and data. Russia recently created

a law to create its independent Internet capable of operating

outside the global network, thus following the blueprint of the

People's Republic of China.

Because since the beginning of the Internet in the 1990s,

the Chinese state has defended its rights to censor the Web by

declaring that the country has the right to govern the network

within its borders according to its own rules. Since 1998,

the PRC has erected a great digital wall by limiting access to

foreign sites - notably GAFAM¹ sites - or by forcing them to host their servers in China. By protecting its national market in this way, the Chinese state has created its own digital champions, the BATX², and thus controls the entire network. China is now considered to operate a sort of huge intranet since the country has very few global Internet connection points, no foreign telephone operators operating within its borders, and that unlike what happens on the global network, China-China

Internet traffic never leaves the country³...

 

Could this situation change with the emergence of a high-performance and accessible high-speed space-based Internet?

Could the various projects carried out recently reshuffle the

maps of an essentially terrestrial communication network via

millions of submarine cables? Today, more than 50% of the

Earth's inhabitants, or nearly 3 billion people, still do not have

access to the Internet. According to a recent United Nations

report, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and

Nigeria alone account for 55% of all Internet-deprived people.

A New Given with Space-based Internet?

Starlink, the ambitious project of the SpaceX company, has

scheduled launching into low orbit⁴ 12,000 satellites and then

42,000 minisatellites more to provide Internet service anywhere

in the world and especially in less populated areas. Other

projects, such as Amazon's Kuiper (3,500 satellites), OneWeb,

an Anglo-Indian company (648 satellites), the Russian

Startrocket (200 satellites) and others to come (notably

European and Chinese) are in the works. Unlike the

geostationary⁵ orbit where current satellites are launched, low

altitude offers the double advantage of high throughput and

minimal latency.

Other projects, such as that of the American startup Cloud

Constellation, are preparing to send satellites into low orbit

to increase storage capacity and ensure data protection against

cyberthreats.

But criticized for the very high number of satellites required for

good coverage, low-altitude satellite projects, and in particular

that of Elon Musk, have been slowed down by opposition from

astronomers and NASA. They see it as a major risk of light visual

pollution and waste in space, disruption of observations and of

collision with other satellites or even with the ISS...

However, beyond heavenly nuisances, this takeover of space

poses a much greater threat to other players: authoritarian

regimes.

 

In a February 2021 Business Insider article, John Byrne, director

of telecommunications technology services at GlobalData said,

"Satellites are a game-changer because governments don't

control space. As a result, governments find it much more

difficult to regulate the content accessible by satellite". States

have the right to regulate vertical space, for example when

planes travel in their airspace. From this point of view, "the

question is whether satellites in low orbit will be considered as

being part of the area controlled by governments or not", says

John Byrne.

 

While waiting for the start of operations of these satellite

services (the profitability of which is sometimes called into

question), the answers are not long in coming. In December

2020, an article in the Russian edition of Popular Mechanics

reported that the Russian government could impose fines on

any person or business who used Starlink's Internet connection.

 

In addition, the Business Insider site reports that Russia has

plans to develop its own constellation of Internet satellites,

Sfera, which could be launched in 2024. "The project would

probably allow the country to continue to monitor its domestic

Internet traffic", indicates John Byrne.

 

Further according to Business Insider, China is working on

deploying a mega-constellation of 12,922 satellites in low orbit.

By coordinating the main players of the Chinese space industry,

the country wants to launch the "Guowang" network

(or "national network" composed of two sub-constellations,

maneuvering between 312 and 725 miles (500 and 1,145

kilometers) of altitude. Ultimately, this mega-constellation

could be ideally placed to cover the Asian continent, whereas

SpaceX and Amazon would focus on America, then Europe.

"Guowang" could thus be integrated into the sprawling New

Silk Road project, dear to Chinese president Xi Jinping, as a

formidable tool of national control and international influence.

*The historical instances of the Internet

 

- ICANN: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and

Numbers. It has for mission to attribute numerical Web

addresses to websites and computers.

- UIT: International Telecommunications Union, the United

Nations agency regroups States, operators, universities and

organizations to attribute worldwide radio-electrical

frequencies and satellite orbits.

- ISOC: Internet Society: promotion of the development and

use of the Internet. 

- IAB: Internet Architecture Board, committee tasked with the

surveillance and development of the Internet, designated by

the Internet Society (ISOC).

- IETF: Internet Engineering Task Force: it is one of the IAB

Task Forces tasked with the architectural orientations of the

development and promotion of the communication

standards.

- IRTF another IAB Task Force, the IRTF concentrates on

longer-terms research problems on protocols, applications,

architecture and technology.

- IGF: International Government Forum, a forum organized

every year under the supervision of the United Nations. 

Exploiting the loopholes of "laisser-faire"

Chinese protectionism does not prevent its players from

conquering new markets, especially in Africa⁶, where operators

such as Huawei offer very affordable Chinese mobiles or invest

in the construction of strategic infrastructure in exchange for

control over data circulating there.

 

A potential influence, including the most developed countries,

with in particular risks of espionage considered to be very

serious are linked to the meteoric growth of certain

technologies and applications. The most famous, TikTok, very

popular with the young, even the very young, is the one app

experiencing the most dazzling progress during the lockdown:

850 million downloads in 2020, more than a billion users in 2021!

It is also the app on which users spend the most time: 52

minutes on average, 80 minutes per day for the 4-15 year old!

And when you know that "when it's free, you are the product",

you can worry about the use of data shared by very young

users.

 

Threatened with a ban on American soil by Donald Trump, the

Chinese application has in the end been approved as some sort

of Sino-American venture, but due to the lack of an

international regulatory body that can exert pressure, the rules

for use have not changed so far. Serious questions remain

about the ownership and operation of the app, the transfer of

user data to China as well as the amount of personal data it

collects on citizens and how its algorithms could be used to

shape what its users think...

Towards new regulations?

Of course, in democratic countries, other players and in

particular the GAFAMs are not exempt from all criticism and

after a period of "laissez faire", debates on the issues of

regulation abound, in Europe as in the United States.

Because, by their number of subscribers, the use of artificial

intelligence and algorithms, their hold on the workings of the

network is very real.

 

Some examples, among others:

 

 - Twitter had the unprecedented ability to cut off the speech

of a country’s President by deciding to delete Donald Trump's

account in less than 15 minutes.

- Google has a huge impact on access to information knowing

that it is the most used⁷ search engine in the world and that

through its algorithms, it has the ability to give more or less

visibility to certain content. It can also promote its own

products and services to the detriment of competing services,

such as Google Shopping, the product and price comparator,

recently identified by the European competition commissioner,

Margrethe Vestager.

- Facebook is regularly audited for its anti-democratic

practices: data collection, dissemination of hate speech inciting

violence, surveillance, manipulation of opinion, lack of

moderation and control over drug trafficking or human

trafficking humans… this does not prevent it, however, from

remaining one of the most important social networks: 2.8 billion

users, 7.38 billion if Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and

Instagram are added to it.

- With 197 million monthly customers, the e-commerce site

Amazon, considered to be the world's leading e-commerce

site⁸, is regularly accused of anti-competitive practices.

In addition, its AWS (Amazon Web Services) subsidiary

dominates the hosting market, hosting on its servers more than

40% of software applications and web services worldwide.

Among its millions of customers, AWS counts Netflix, Twitter,

Zoom, Airbnb, many American administrations such as the CIA

or the US Navy and 80% of French companies in the CAC 40

[French Dow Jones Index]... Needless to say that the blocking or

failure of its servers would have repercussions on the

functioning of the Internet and the global economy...

 

But since neither fines by the billions⁹, nor the threats from the

States have succeeded in changing the situation, regulators are

now working on competitive regulation, notes Fabienne

Schmitt, head of the high tech and media department at Les

Echos. "It is a matter of stopping certain practices and

allowing the emergence of competing players, even as

alternatives today are crushed by these new quasi-monopolies

(...) The other path targeted by the regulators concerns the

control of personal data. What kind of use? What type of

protection? What kind of sharing should be forced between

competitors? If the GDPR¹⁰ is a first response, it is not enough".

The note

 

- The American origin of the Internet explains that the

network has developed within a liberal philosophy of “laisser

faire” without real regulations of legal framework.

- The private actors of the digital realm and in particular the

GAFAM have acquired such power that States and

international organizations have trouble regulating them.

Currently, the most active in the domain of data protection

and anti-competition practices is the European Union.

- Through infrastructure, certain authoritarian States have

succeeded in totally controlling access to the network in their

country. This is the case of China.

- This control could eventually be questioned with the rise of

low-orbit Internet spatial networks. The development of this

new Internet access would also allow to develop new storage

capabilities.

1- GAFAM: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft

2- BATX: Baidu (search engine), Alibaba (e-commerce and hosting), Tencent (social media, in particular Tencent QQ and WeChat, Web portals, advertising, commerce and online games), Xiaomi (mobile phones and mass market electronics. 2nd worldwide smartphone maker in 2021 after Samsung and before Apple)

3- by comparison: only approximately 25% of French traffic remains in France.

4- Low Orbit: between 330 and 1,320 kilometers (206 - 825 miles)

5- Geostationary Orbit: approximately 36,000 kilometers (22,500 miles)

6- Specially in Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Uganda

7- An average 90 % of the worldwide market, to the exception of China, 0 % and Russia, 46%

8- In 2020, the revenue of Amazon was of 296,3 billion dollars, or four times more than its Chinese competitor, Alibaba, whose income amounted to 72 billion dollars during the period.  

9- In two years, Google just by itself was condemned to 8.2 billion euros in fines by Brussels for dominant position abuse.

10- GDPR: General Data Protection Regulation

 

Documentation sources: arte.tv, hellofuture.orange.com, businessinsider.fr, popmech.ru, lebigdata.fr, lesechos.fr

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