When President Xi whispered a few sweet nothings into Vladimir Putin’s ear last week, it was a private exchange that they wanted everyone to hear.
“Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years, and we are driving this change together,” President Xi Jinping told his “warm friend”, the Russian President.
Just as this column predicted one year ago, Putin and Xi have forged a wide ranging global technology pact. The agreement comprehensively yokes the two states together, with internet technology a key area. Explicitly, they vow that “new and responsible national codes of conduct in information cyberspace should be formulated, especially universal international legal instruments”.
They’re also keen to change how the internet works at a technical level, a task China has been undertaking for years.
“China wants to make sure that the digital infrastructure of the future is based on Chinese standards and patents, and on the other side, China wants to make sure that you can use that technology to monitor and control the population in a digital society,” one insider told me.
To understand how they seek to achieve this, it helps to know a little about the unique qualities of the internet: its very peculiar texture, history and governance.
Forty years ago, before telecommunications liberalisation, technical networking standards were the domain of the lumbering dinosaurs of the state phone monopolies, and computing giants like IBM. They took an eternity to forge standards for connecting computers together. So long, in fact, that ultimately, nobody wanted to use their work.
By contrast, the internet’s engineers came from a computing background, and improvised. They created the bare minimum for getting networks to talk to other networks. The clue’s in the name – “inter-networking”. Rough and ready it may be, but it worked.
This left us with two distinct legacies. One is that the stack of “protocols” – the technical agreements that networks need to cooperate – is a mess. Another legacy is that the governance frameworks lent themselves to capture by a powerful state. Enter China.
There are two forums that decide the internet’s technical standards, and both have either been captured, or faced a constant battle against infiltration. One is the International Telecommunications Union, founded a month after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. The other is an engineer-led forum called the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF.
“The ITU is a United Nations organisation, and behaves exactly as you would expect a UN organisation to behave,” a participant told me. Junkets are the order of the day – creating an agreeable lifestyle marred only by the junketeers ever having to decide anything.
The ITU elected its first Chinese Secretary General in 2014, and as researcher Emily Taylor, formerly of the Chatham House think tank found, by April 2021 China held over 30pc of chairman and vice-chairman positions at the ITU, compared to 7.6pc for the United States, an 6.1pc for the United Kingdom. So far, so familiar: the infiltration here mirrors China’s long march through other UN agencies, such as the World Health Organisation (WHO).
