-Analysis-
SINGAPORE — In the recent “sell or ban” controversy over ByteDance’s social media platform TikTok, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that “Communist China owning TikTok’s algorithm is the gateway to spying on Americans and manipulating public opinion in the United States.”
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Paradoxically, this argument is reminiscent of the Chinese government’s defense of its ban on foreign social media. Since 2009, Beijing has viewed platforms such as Facebook, Twitter (now X) and Google as secret weapons for the “peaceful evolution” of China by “foreign forces.” And it has emphasized that the uncensored internet is a threat to national security.
Washington once criticized Beijing’s internet blockade, and in 2009, when then-President Barack Obama visited Shanghai, he said, “I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free internet — or unrestricted internet access is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.”
At that time, Obama intended to maintain the global open internet. But later, both Republican or Democratic administrations have more or less started to block it. With Congress pushing a bill to require foreign companies to sell their social media platforms on “national security” grounds, Washington’s once-promoted “internet freedom” agenda now seems to be coming to an end.
Fall of the digital Berlin Wall
Under the grand narrative of “the end of history,” the United States in the post-Cold War era was full of hope for “global democratization”; with the victory of Western liberalism in the ideological struggle, the authoritarian system, though still spreading across most of the world’s countries, seemed to have gradually lost its momentum.
After the turn of the century, however, this optimism about global liberalism experienced many ups and downs: in the aftermath of 9/11 terrorist attacks and the George W. Bush administration’s failed war in Iraq; and in China, where the economy is growing rapidly, the Communist Party’s confidence in its political system has only grown. The global financial crisis of 2008 challenged the Washington consensus at a time when political scientists were discussing the “decline of democracy” and the “resilience of authoritarianism.”
The Google Doctrine facilitated a marriage between the U.S. government and private capital in Silicon Valley.
Neither the theory of modernization, which holds that “economic development drives political freedom,” nor neoconservatism, which promotes “military intervention to defend the free world,” seems to be able to turn the “global democratization” that the United States wants into a reality.
After the 2008 recession, the growth of the consumer internet industry not only contributed to the recovery of the U.S. economy, but also provided a new opportunity for the “end of history.”
From the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009 to the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia in 2010, local opposition used the internet (on blogs and social media) to mobilize and to fight centralized government; academics and media outlets cleverly referred to a series of movements in the Arab Spring as the “Facebook Revolution” or the “Twitter Revolution.” Under the wave of globalization, the internet had brought down the Berlin Wall in the real world.
Freedom to connect
The Obama administration realized that the technology developed in Silicon Valley would become a platform for global civil society, as social networks turned the world into a “global village.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argued in 2010 that Washington had a responsibility to preserve internet freedom worldwide.
Citing U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech during World War II, she argued that in addition to freedom of speech and expression, religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, the “freedom to connect” must be guaranteed in the information society. She suggested that no government has the right to deprive people of their internet freedom. This vision of internet companies promoting “global democratization” was then called the “Google Doctrine” by technology commentator Evgeny Morozov.
The Google Doctrine facilitated a marriage between the U.S. government and private capital in Silicon Valley. According to Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, internet freedom in the United States at the beginning of this century consisted of two principles. On the one hand, its agenda assumed that “markets, individual choice and competition” would be the guiding principles of global Internet development, i.e., that national government regulation would have to give way to private enterprise and globalized non-profit groups.
Bill Clinton compared Beijing’s cyber-blocking to “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”
On the other hand, Washington wanted to preserve freedom of expression on the internet and combat restrictions and blockades on offshore sites in countries like China and Iran; the Obama administration long denounced the centralized state’s “electronic curtain,” a reference to the Cold War’s Iron Curtain, while the administration also invested in the development of anti-censorship software, spending more than 0 million during its term.
Meanwhile, advocates of “Googleism” argued that centralized government censorship of the internet is unsustainable. Internet researcher Ethan Zuckerman proposed the “Cute Cat Theory”: he emphasized that if centralized governments wanted to restrict the internet, they would have to block both politically motivated information and non-political content (such as cat and cat fandoms), and that blocking the latter would annoy the public.
Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, said in a 2012 interview that China’s deployment of internet censorship would prevent the country from “building a modern knowledge society.” On the occasion of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2000, former President Bill Clinton compared Beijing’s cyber-blocking to “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, argued that countries that restrict the internet will not be able to enjoy the dividends of 21st century technological advances, and that without open and transparent information and journalism, investors will lose long-term confidence in these markets. In the cat-and-mouse game of internet censorship, the U.S. government, academia, and industry at the time already thought they had bet on a winner.
“Googleism” and its discontents
Such optimistic technological determinism places platforms and networks at the center of political change, ignoring complex regional realities and power relations. In his 2011 book The Net Delusion, Morozov criticized cyber-utopianism, suggesting that cyber-technology can both constrain and entrench traditional political power. While protesters use social media to fight against authoritarian governments, those in power can also use internet technology to suppress dissidents and even consolidate their political power in the real world.
Since the 1990s, the Chinese government has posed one of the greatest challenges to the “internet freedom” narrative: China’s internet access began in 1994, and the “Great Firewall” was already in place in 1997. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were permanently blocked in China after the July 2009 riots in Urumqi, and Google Search was withdrawn from the Chinese market in the wake of censorship disputes. As the democracy movement in the Middle East erupted, Beijing became increasingly aware of the political mobilization power of the internet.
Concerns about “internet freedom” are not without reason. On the one hand, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) of a color revolution corresponds to the political imagination of the U.S. government and academics about “internet freedom” in the late 2000s. For example, a July 2009 commentary in China’s National Defense Daily pointed out that Moldova’s “Twitter revolution” proved the “incendiary power” of U.S. social networking platforms, and that China must be wary of the internet becoming a tool for “hostile external forces” to target China.
Silicon Valley companies could also become the long arm of Washington.
But on the other hand, Silicon Valley companies, which have a near monopoly on global internet services, could also become the long arm of Washington: the National Security Agency (NSA) documents leaked to the media by Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed the PRISM program’s surveillance of global computer communications. The U.S. government has a long history of not only infiltrating foreign networks but also soliciting information about foreign users directly from domestic technology companies.
Beijing has also attacked Obama’s agenda on a theoretical level; the concept of “internet sovereignty” was first introduced in the State Council Information Office’s White Paper in 2010 on the State of China’s Internet, and in 2011 China and Russia submitted a proposal for an International Code of Conduct on Information Security to the UN General Assembly, emphasizing that “decision-making on Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereignty of each country.”
In 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed for the first time that “cyberspace is not a place outside the law” at the second World Internet Conference in Wuzhen. The 2017 Strategy for International Cooperation in Cyberspace explicitly “opposes any country interfering in the internal affairs of other countries through the Internet, and advocates that all countries have the right and responsibility to maintain their own cybersecurity.”
Surveillance capitalism
At the same time, with the expansion of Silicon Valley companies, the negative side of internet technology has gradually unfolded, and the attitude of the American public toward online platforms has changed. For example, in the 2016 presidential election, Facebook, which helped elect Barack Obama to the presidency and helped the Tunisian people to fight against the powerful, was seen as the main culprit for spreading “false information” and “hate speech.”
Under surveillance capitalism, the collection and misuse of personal data by social media and the addictive nature of the platforms themselves have all contributed to the Democratic Party’s efforts to hold Silicon Valley companies accountable and regulate the content of the platforms. But to a certain extent, it has led to controversy over whether or not to reject the principle of government intervention in the cyberspace.
The internet has become a catalyst for the decline of liberal beliefs.
As one can see, beneath the surface of the digital “civic square,” social media platforms are not the “public sphere” idealized by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Former CNN Beijing bureau chief Rebecca MacKinnon argued as early as 2012 that while market-based online platforms masquerade as public spaces, they lack public accountability mechanisms in a deregulated political environment.
Fred Turner, a professor of communication at Stanford University, argues that under surveillance capitalism, social media platforms have turned the democratic imaginary of “personalized, expressive” democracy into a source of economic profit. In the post-Arab Spring decade, rather than spreading the gospel of democracy, the internet has become a catalyst for the decline of liberal beliefs.
Europe sides with sovereignty
Concerns about the hegemony of Silicon Valley have pushed Europe to fall on the side of “sovereignty” in internet governance. Even Europe, which was pro-U.S. at the time, can hardly ignore the blatant invasion of privacy by the U.S. against the EU government, businesses, and people as demonstrated in the Snowden case.
European companies and regulators are also afraid of the U.S. monopoly of the global internet market: In a 2014 open letter, German entrepreneur Mathias Döpfner said that Google would become a “digital superstate” above the law. The EU then stepped up its regulatory efforts: In 2018, it began implementing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which aims to regulate tech companies’ violations of EU citizens’ privacy rights and levy hefty fines on companies that break the law.
The GDPR applies not only to companies operating in the EU, but also penalizes technology companies established outside the EU to serve EU residents. Since 2020, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has repeatedly emphasized the importance of “digital sovereignty” as the theoretical basis for everything from data regulation to e-industry policy.
