[Commentary] Few minds in China are likely to change on account of Hillary Clinton's call for "a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas." Last week, the U.S. secretary of state laid out two competing visions of the Internet: one open and global, the other highly controlled and often used for repression. Given that China is rapidly trending toward the latter, it's time to start asking: What might a permanently fractured Web look like?
Technologically savvy Chinese "netizens" -- if that term even has meaning in a place like China -- find ways to fan qiang (scale the "Great Firewall"), but most users, like their counterparts elsewhere, are more interested in entertainment gossip, pirated MP3s, and updates from their friends than missives from Falun Gong or the latest report from Human Rights Watch. U.S. State Department spending on proxy servers or technologies that hide users' identities temporarily allow some Chinese greater access to information online, but won't substantially change the underlying dynamics.
If a strategy built around better defense, multilateral cooperative mechanisms to limit cyberconflict, and efforts to promote American values on the Web fails, we may have to rethink both how we try to influence China and the others, as well as what type of Internet we want.
