How the World Got Wired

Chapter 17 — The Other Internet

Imagine — or maybe remember, if it has happened to you — landing at an airport in a country you have never been to, getting to your hotel room, connecting to the Wi-Fi, and pulling out your phone.

If you fly from the United States to most countries in the world — Mexico, Vietnam, France, Japan, Kenya, Brazil — everything on your phone works pretty much the same as it does at home. The apps open. Instagram loads. YouTube plays. Google returns search results. WhatsApp finds your contacts. Your email arrives. The internet, when you travel, mostly feels like the internet you already know.

But there are a few countries where this is not the case. If you fly to China and connect to the Wi-Fi in a Beijing hotel, almost nothing on your phone will work. Google doesn’t load. YouTube doesn’t play. Facebook is dark. Instagram is dark. WhatsApp doesn’t deliver. Wikipedia is blocked. The New York Times is blocked. Most of the websites and apps you have used your entire life, in the country your phone is now sitting in, are simply unavailable.

This is not a glitch. It is the result of a deliberate policy of the Chinese government, in place since the late 1990s, called the Great Firewall.

I want you to stop for a moment, because what I just told you is important.

The internet you have been reading about for sixteen chapters — the open global network that Cerf and Kahn designed, the no-boss system, the place where information flows freely from any computer to any other computer — does not actually reach into the country with the most people on Earth. The version of the internet that about 1.4 billion Chinese people use, every day, is a different version. It was built differently. It is run differently. It is owned differently.

For most of this book, when I have said the internet, I have really been talking about the American internet. It is the largest and most famous version. It is the one that grew out of ARPA and CERN, that ran on Cerf and Kahn’s free protocols, that built itself on Berners-Lee’s free web. But it is not the only version. And the gap between the American internet and the rest is growing, not shrinking.

This chapter is about that fact. It starts with the single most popular app in the world right now — an app you and your friends have almost certainly opened today — which is, quietly, a product of the other internet.

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