Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube don’t owe their profitability to superior technology, other than some techniques for managing large amounts of user data. They make money because they have a lot of eyeballs to which they can deliver advertisements. — Dreamstime/TNS
The Internet, once a freewheeling global network, is becoming balkanised into national spheres of influence. This could be bad for both cross-cultural communication and US tech companies.
China has long protected its local Internet, censoring speech behind what has become known as the Great Firewall. The government blocks US-based services such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, and closely monitors the local Chinese versions. Other authoritarian and quasi-authoritarian countries – Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Vietnam, Ethiopia – do the same. And Russia recently passed a so-called sovereign Internet law that makes it much easier for the government to monitor and control online content.
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