The Internet has been global, with the same experience for every browsing person, for decades now. It has led to a more homogenised world, as it is dominated by the English language. Popular services like eBay have been cloned in every culture.
The exception has been the firewall countries like China , Saudi Arabia and North Korea.
With the GDPR in Europe, that is changing. While in the past local laws have detailed specific products or services a website might not be able to provide locally (like gambling, supply of pharmaceuticals), we now have regional data laws that apply across the board, depending on where a web visitor has come from.
Recently, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned about the risk of “a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America.”
The natural progression for Western countries (or states, California is getting its own version of GDPR), is that via a few different versions of this, we end up with one GDPR policy for the entire West. At some point a decision might be made to start firewalling websites and even countries that aren’t a part of the Western GDPR.
Meanwhile as China rapidly increases their influence and control of the East, expect to see more firewalls to go up that block the West. If they can bribe African leaders to lease agricultural land, convincing them to block access to the evil West – in exchange for trade deals – might be a possibility.
Data localisation is also an issue – where data is stored. Russia and China require all data to be stored locally, on servers that are physically local. Some Western countries have similar, and the trend is towards all countries having this, where there are only other certain countries where your local data can be safely stored – New Zealand might trust Australia, for example.
Something China doesn’t control is the actual Internet infrastructure. Expect to see them start building their own, parallel Internet. It could be disguised as a secure channel for government or military business (which is how our Internet began).
