In
the early days of what is now a well-worn cliché -- the Information
Technology Revolution -- Thomas Friedman toured the world writing about
how data and its handlers (mostly in India, though not always) would
triumph over pesky differences of borders, social and linguistic
differences to make the world a truly Flat One, a case he made rather
strongly. In Friedman's world, geopolitics will, inter alia, be
a relic of the past, practiced by stodgy wonks not sufficiently clued
in. Friedman's mantra became such a pervasive one that the business
strategist Pankaj Ghemawat almost always brings up a point in an
interview from that era with an Indian TV journalist where she asked --
in all credulity -- whether Ghemawat (whose research on globalization is
a sobering account of what it is still not) still believed in a "Round
World."
That was almost a decade ago. Despite the recent manifesto of Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen where they declare the internet to be “[the] online world not truly bound by terrestrial laws”, developments in the last year or so (and not the least due to a certain unruly NSA contractor) have affirmed that geopolitics -- and its extension, geoeconomics -- still rules the roost when it comes to the physical infrastructure that is the backbone of the internet. Data still lives in a round world, it now seems.
Before we state our reasons for believing this, it might be prudent to lay down two very basic (and self-evident) facts, reinforced by Mr. Snowden’s revelations. One, data -- its possession, transmission and access -- is still very much still controlled by nation-states and their instruments. Physical proximity to servers and their locations will become very important as we collect more and more data (often of a very individually intrusive nature) and will mostly likely be one of the main issues of contention between economic powers. Two, there is a yet-another “The Two Cultures” problem. Most (though not all) technologists believe leaders of nation-states are minor irritants at best and irrelevant obstructionists at worst. Political leaders across most of the world, on the other hand, believe technology to be an on/off ally at best and a force to be either managed or unleashed against their adversaries at the right time. This fundamental communication gap continues because both sides refuse to see the Internet in its totality, the ethereal and the physical packaged in an inseparable tangle.
Of course, this is not to exonerate the complicity of the technology giants with instruments of state power. On the contrary, recent evidence show that internet giants are increasing locating their data centers to countries that have had, historically, very close ties with the US. For example, the decisions by Google and Facebook to locate their data centers to Scandinavia ostensibly had to do with the low temperatures needed to cool their data centers though there is much to this story.
In Google’s case, another stated reason was the easy availability of high-trained engineers who might service such centers. Unfortunately, this is rather flimsy as far as an argument goes. One can think of Russia (which is certifiably freezing and has one of the largest scientific manpower among all Western states) could be an equally competitive destination for such data centers. Another interesting thing stand outs about Google: it turns out that the only Google data center (OK, so a modular data center) in a Latin-Amercian country is in Chile, a very close ally of the US government.
We wish we could report that Facebook has gone on a more different path; the truth here too is that it has chosen Scandinavia -- Sweden, in particular -- for a new state-of-the-art data center. It might have been cold comfort had we not known of a law in 2009 -- the FRA Law -- which allows the Swedish government to intercept internet communications. And while conspiracy theories do not come to me very naturally, what mechanisms do we have in place that will prevent the Swedish government from volunteering data to the US, especially social media data, which is almost infinite in context?
There are three messages that one can draw from this.
The unspoken message here is the most insidious. Bluntly put, an American company that holds deep data sets of a large segment of the American population will simply not put a data center is a country that might, with some patience, put a splitter and route these data sets for their national and, potentially, politico-military use. It could also be conjectured that neither will the US government be comfortable with such an arrangement.
The other message is for developing countries looking towards IT-enabled services as a way to break out of their economic rut. In the recent years and with the growth of Big Data, a sizable chunk of IT services are moving towards data-mining often of social media. Given this trend, technology giants and their government backers will be become more and more reluctant to move data centers “onsite” to these countries no matter how great the labor arbitrage is, especially if the host country is deemed as unstable or politically unfriendly. One can confidently predict that even if IT services in Brazil or Venezuela (to take examples) were to, say tomorrow, offer potential breakthroughs in data-mining technology that would require on-site data centers holding critical data sets about US population, the US national security establishment would be bound to obstruct US companies from taking advantage of it.
Finally, more than a decade ago, the strategist Edward Luttwak coined the terms “geoeconomics” to describe the intersection of global politics and economic interests, often leading to war or serious rumblings thereof. Luttwak, mostly active during the Cold War, understood the terms of each actor while the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction loomed large over Moscow and New York. More recently, Parag Khanna’s formulation of “geotechnology” tries to supplant Luttwak in predicting a (perhaps nasty) struggle over information and its control; a poignant example in this direction was the Russia-Estonia cyber attack in 2007 which almost changed the political dimensions in that part of the world. Neither Khanna nor Schmidt and Cohen point to anything sunnier -- the latter write of a parallel Cold War to be fought at the level of code, adding a caveat that this will, like the original Cold War, never end in a shooting war.
It might be fair to say that the jury will be out on this one within the next decade or so.
[Originally posted on October 24 2013. Edited on November 08 2013]
Abhijnan Rej writes about systemic risks, national security, geopolitics and on technology and policy as an avocation. All views expressed in this article are his alone and do not reflect or purport to reflect the views of his employers.
That was almost a decade ago. Despite the recent manifesto of Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen where they declare the internet to be “[the] online world not truly bound by terrestrial laws”, developments in the last year or so (and not the least due to a certain unruly NSA contractor) have affirmed that geopolitics -- and its extension, geoeconomics -- still rules the roost when it comes to the physical infrastructure that is the backbone of the internet. Data still lives in a round world, it now seems.
Before we state our reasons for believing this, it might be prudent to lay down two very basic (and self-evident) facts, reinforced by Mr. Snowden’s revelations. One, data -- its possession, transmission and access -- is still very much still controlled by nation-states and their instruments. Physical proximity to servers and their locations will become very important as we collect more and more data (often of a very individually intrusive nature) and will mostly likely be one of the main issues of contention between economic powers. Two, there is a yet-another “The Two Cultures” problem. Most (though not all) technologists believe leaders of nation-states are minor irritants at best and irrelevant obstructionists at worst. Political leaders across most of the world, on the other hand, believe technology to be an on/off ally at best and a force to be either managed or unleashed against their adversaries at the right time. This fundamental communication gap continues because both sides refuse to see the Internet in its totality, the ethereal and the physical packaged in an inseparable tangle.
Of course, this is not to exonerate the complicity of the technology giants with instruments of state power. On the contrary, recent evidence show that internet giants are increasing locating their data centers to countries that have had, historically, very close ties with the US. For example, the decisions by Google and Facebook to locate their data centers to Scandinavia ostensibly had to do with the low temperatures needed to cool their data centers though there is much to this story.
In Google’s case, another stated reason was the easy availability of high-trained engineers who might service such centers. Unfortunately, this is rather flimsy as far as an argument goes. One can think of Russia (which is certifiably freezing and has one of the largest scientific manpower among all Western states) could be an equally competitive destination for such data centers. Another interesting thing stand outs about Google: it turns out that the only Google data center (OK, so a modular data center) in a Latin-Amercian country is in Chile, a very close ally of the US government.
We wish we could report that Facebook has gone on a more different path; the truth here too is that it has chosen Scandinavia -- Sweden, in particular -- for a new state-of-the-art data center. It might have been cold comfort had we not known of a law in 2009 -- the FRA Law -- which allows the Swedish government to intercept internet communications. And while conspiracy theories do not come to me very naturally, what mechanisms do we have in place that will prevent the Swedish government from volunteering data to the US, especially social media data, which is almost infinite in context?
There are three messages that one can draw from this.
The unspoken message here is the most insidious. Bluntly put, an American company that holds deep data sets of a large segment of the American population will simply not put a data center is a country that might, with some patience, put a splitter and route these data sets for their national and, potentially, politico-military use. It could also be conjectured that neither will the US government be comfortable with such an arrangement.
The other message is for developing countries looking towards IT-enabled services as a way to break out of their economic rut. In the recent years and with the growth of Big Data, a sizable chunk of IT services are moving towards data-mining often of social media. Given this trend, technology giants and their government backers will be become more and more reluctant to move data centers “onsite” to these countries no matter how great the labor arbitrage is, especially if the host country is deemed as unstable or politically unfriendly. One can confidently predict that even if IT services in Brazil or Venezuela (to take examples) were to, say tomorrow, offer potential breakthroughs in data-mining technology that would require on-site data centers holding critical data sets about US population, the US national security establishment would be bound to obstruct US companies from taking advantage of it.
Finally, more than a decade ago, the strategist Edward Luttwak coined the terms “geoeconomics” to describe the intersection of global politics and economic interests, often leading to war or serious rumblings thereof. Luttwak, mostly active during the Cold War, understood the terms of each actor while the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction loomed large over Moscow and New York. More recently, Parag Khanna’s formulation of “geotechnology” tries to supplant Luttwak in predicting a (perhaps nasty) struggle over information and its control; a poignant example in this direction was the Russia-Estonia cyber attack in 2007 which almost changed the political dimensions in that part of the world. Neither Khanna nor Schmidt and Cohen point to anything sunnier -- the latter write of a parallel Cold War to be fought at the level of code, adding a caveat that this will, like the original Cold War, never end in a shooting war.
It might be fair to say that the jury will be out on this one within the next decade or so.
[Originally posted on October 24 2013. Edited on November 08 2013]
Abhijnan Rej writes about systemic risks, national security, geopolitics and on technology and policy as an avocation. All views expressed in this article are his alone and do not reflect or purport to reflect the views of his employers.
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