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Национальная безопасность и Индустрия 4.0: Интернет-балканизация и цифровые границы
This article is aimed at observing the processes of Internet fragmentation throughout different regions of the world in terms of global political trends and national security. In order to do this, we highlight the trends of the so-called Balkanization of cyberspace, its prerequisites, peculiarities, challenges, and specifics for the most vivid cases. Currently, the world is experiencing the growth of numerous promising new technologies – the process which is named The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab. However, these new technologies need the Internet to be successful and useful. The Internet, on the other hand, is quickly changing and dissolving into different national fragments. This process is sometimes called internet balkanization. While initially, at the beginning of the 1990s, the Internet was seen as a tool of future globalization and virtually unlimited communication and entertainment, nowadays it is regulated by the governments across the world. In order to demonstrate this tendency the cases of the USA, the EU, China, and Russia are observed. The US is the country that profits the most from the globalized Internet since the US has a larger control over the Web and many IT-companies. However, due to alleged digital interference in the elections in 2016, the US started building new cybersecurity and aims to fight foreign influences. China is an example of the Internet which was isolated from the beginning. The Great Chinese Firewall blocks a large amount of foreign websites and services. Due to this, the Chinese Internet has a specific structure and design. At the same time, China develops the Digital Silk Road – its own digital infrastructure in foreign countries. The EU has regulated its data traffic since the 1990s. However, for a long time data exchange with the US was unsupervised. However, after Snowden’s revelations in 2013, the position of European politicians significantly changed, and they took measures against US companies. Russia combines approaches of the EU and China. While the Russian Internet in the 1990s was almost unregulated, in the 21st century it became regulated and has laws on data localization. To conclude, it is evident that while the Internet possesses potential threats, governments will regulate it and limit it, thus drawing “digital borders”