(Wired) The Chinese internet is not like the internet in the rest of the world. More than 150 of the world’s 1,000 most popular internet sites are blocked in China, including Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Instead, domestic platforms like Baidu, WeChat, and Sina Weibo thrive.
Internet freedom advocates have worried that the internet will fracture into multiple national “splinternets” since France banned Yahoo’s ecommerce users from selling Nazi paraphernalia in the country in 2000, whether due to state censorship or well-intentioned policies that alter the web experience. The Tor Project says at least a dozen countries, including Pakistan and Russia, censor the internet. Meanwhile, search results within the European Union can differ from those elsewhere due to its right to be forgotten law, and web publishers around the world are still grappling with the effect of the sweeping EU privacy regulations that took effect this year.
A series of laws passed in California this year raise a new possibility: that individual US states will splinter off into their own versions of the internet.
