A short history of geoeconomics and geopolitics of the internet for the age of the USA-PRC technology war

The www is a network whose nodes are documents and whose links are URLs that allow us to ‘stuff’ with one click from one web document to another exceeding in size even the human brain. With Trump declared TRADE AND TECHNOLOGY war in 2018 INTERNET has become a strategic battleground of the war as USA and PRC try to win by ring-fencing their supply chains. ARPANET, funded by PENTAGON, was the brainchild of Paul Baran for packet switching, Vint Cref for writing TCP/IP protocols and Sir Tim Berners Lee for developing the world wide web that connected computers to each other so that people could see what was on other nodes than their own hard drive. The INTERNET was built without memory. Self-governing cyber-communities can escape geography and rely in open source, peer-to-peer networking. OPEN-SOURCE collaborative network created a very large portion of the lines of code on which the INTERNET, smartphones, stock markets and airplanes. But in 21st Century, governments developed techniques for controlling offshore INTERNET communications, thus enforcing their laws by exercising coercion within their borders. The INTERNET’s design was not the result of some grand theory or vision. Open design was necessitated by the particularities of specific engineering challenges. With the ascendancy of FACEBOOK, AMAZON, APPLE, MICROSOFT, and GOOGLE [FAANG] in the USA and BAIDU, ALIBABA, and TENCENT [BAT] in the PRC in 21st Century to solve the ‘trust’ problem of money transactions the industry retreated to the centralized CLOUD abandoning the distributed architecture for centralized monopolies. The CLOUD is gargantuan data centers composed of immense systems of data storage and processors linked together by millions of miles of fiber optic lines and consuming electric power and radiating heat that exceeds most industrial enterprises in history. The INTERNET may have ushered in a new age of sustainable open systems, but as APPLE and MICROSOFT have shown an integrated closed system monopoly remains as irresistible as ever both in the USA and PRC.