If you zoom in on Ukraine on Google Maps, you might think that the country is currently a paradise for cyclists and pedestrians. No orange or red lines depicting slow-moving traffic? Not a single traffic jam in the whole country?
This is of course deceptive, in analogue Ukraine fleeing people in cars are clogging the streets, Russian tanks are blocking roads. But Google has turned off its “Live Traffic” feature at the request of the government, as has Apple’s map service.
What may make supporters of Ukraine happy also exposes the downside of the little helpers that almost everyone has in their pockets: When things get serious, the traffic jam app becomes a target for fighter jets. A US company like Google can intervene in battles on the other side of the world.
In the eyes of many governments, the monopoly structures of the technology companies have turned them into weapons of war. At the end of this development could be the end of the internet as we know it. Mutual blockades threaten, a kind of censorship ping-pong between the conflicting parties. The free flow of information, which is particularly urgently needed in war, suffers as a result.
First, there is Russia, which apparently only sees hostile propaganda on social media. The country restricts access to Facebook and Twitter for its residents. This can be read as an admission that the Kremlin has given up on the information war. For its part, Moscow accuses the US companies of censoring its state media RT and Sputnik. But politicians in the EU also have an influence on what citizens see on the Internet. They urge corporations to choose a side in the information war.
France puts pressure on Twitter, the EU Commission on all social networks. Meta, Apple and Google’s subsidiary YouTube already complied with the request to make RT and Sputnik invisible, although the EU had not yet decided to ban them, which was on Wednesday finally came out. Microsoft took a similar approach on its Bing search engine. Meta in particular has avoided taking a political position for years – most blatantly during the genocide in Myanmar. Now the group turned around and implemented the wishes of the Europeans in a kind of anticipatory obedience.
Moscow and Beijing are just waiting for excuses to say goodbye to the global web
Nobody needs to miss the broadcasters with their uncritical reproduction of state propaganda and their attempts to destabilize Western societies. Nevertheless, the fact that accounts or websites have to be blocked practically on acclamation is known from politicians like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – or from Vladimir Putin, who tried for years to choke off the Telegram chat service because the opposition was networking there. Now it is the West that is creating precedents that the last dictators will refer to in the future in order to have undesirable channels shut down. Or does Facebook only obey the Europeans?
The Union of European Journalists remembered The Commission rightly remembers that censorship – if at all – can only take place in a well thought-out manner and on a solid legal basis. It makes more sense than bans to refute propaganda lies. The Commission, on the other hand, is cheating and simply claiming that sanctions are at stake, not media regulation.
The stakes keep getting higher. The government in Kyiv is trying Bowling Russia from the Global Internet. She appealed to Icann, the organization that takes care of the names and addresses of websites: Please make pages ending in “.ru” inaccessible. That would make people in Russia more vulnerable to hacker attacks, among other things. On the other hand, the influence of such harsh measures on the warlike state leadership is questionable, because Russia is prepared. In its nationalistic delirium, the government practiced decoupling the Russian network from the rest of the world last year.
All of these developments are accelerating the fragmentation of one internet into several “splinternets”. The regimes in Moscow and Beijing are just waiting for excuses to step away from the global web and trap the minds of their citizens in a controlled and monitored silo network.
Companies, civil society and politicians must ensure that interference with the Internet does not get out of hand. Otherwise a kind of social media war economy will establish itself, which will damage democracy in the long term, even in the West.