this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026
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A better question is, why doesn't every country? Just like a government has the duty, right and responsibility to protect its land, maritime territory and airspace, so too should it protect its digital and information space. Allowing hostile actors into your information spaces to psychologically manipulate your people is a recipe for destabilization and loss of sovereignty. China and the DPRK both understand this. China is now a little more open because it is so large and so powerful that it has its own domestic digital ecosystem that can in some aspects rival that of the US, but smaller countries do not have the same resources that China does and should adopt a DPRK like protectionist digital model instead to prevent their digital spaces being completely dominated by US platforms and services, which as we know are weaponized for hostile intelligence operations and hybrid warfare.
yeah, bourgeois control and influence permeates through all faucets of the internet.
Western governments just give no shits about internet security/privacy, lest it influence their capital.
thank you for your feedback ^^
Holy shit! I'm glad the USA doesn't, I'd be more wretchedly ignorant. Like yeah, I could've done without watching a beheading or few... But it was what got me started looking into why.
Actually the USA does have that. It is one of the only countries in the world that has full digital sovereignty, alongside China and the DPRK.
Thanks to its position of global hegemony, practically none of the US digital ecosystem is colonized by the products and services of other countries in the way that US products and services have colonized Europe for example and most of the global south.
And in the rare instances when it does happen that a foreign platform becomes popular in the US, the government quickly identifies that as a national security threat and seeks to either ban or acquire control over it, as we saw with Tiktok.
Yes you get glimpses of other countries because those countries are forced to use US platforms, so there is some intermingling, but the exchange is extremely unequal and US culture dominates.
I doubt, for instance, that you get even a tenth as much German cultural products and German media for example as Germany gets US cultural products and US media. And the German government has absolutely no say in what US citizens see on their own social media platforms.
Whereas what German citizens see on their social media platforms is strongly influenced by the wishes of not just their own government but also the US government, because they are on US platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google, etc. which obey US law.
The US digital ecosystem is sovereign because it is made up of overwhelmingly US companies controlled by the US government, which is precisely why other countries should get out of that ecosystem and build their own.
We have seen far too often US platforms used as vehicles for mass psychological operations to foment discontent, support color revolutions, influence elections, and destabilize countries that are not digitally sovereign.
None of this ever really happens in reverse to the US (despite farcical attempts to claim otherwise, such as the notion that Tiktok was being used by the CPC to influence Americans, or the Russiagate hoax).
Ah yes! I could have specified, that after my introduction to the Internet researching papers for school, my real introduction to the Internet was irc, chatting with people way above my intellectual development. Germans, Australians, Moldovans (one that was decidedly westernized, I used to tease him), Chinese, from the Iberian Peninsula, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Canada, before it was so so liberalized, India, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico (but I also lived and worked among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans), and more where I didn't know their countries of origin. They introduced me to the undemonized/Western washed sides of communism and anarchy. Thanks for the fond recall.
I really didn't spend much time in liberated spaces online after the early aughts, until I came to .ml spaces. US almost erased/diluted them all, and I nearly forgot almost all the irc explorations.
the web would also be less cluttered if each nation had it's own space. it would be awesome to have the option to navigate the global internet or just my nation internet.
This right here.
I'm not advocating full separation. That would be both counter-productive and practically impossible. But in the same way that China started with special economic zones for free international trade (a concept which both the DPRK and Cuba have since also implemented), nations could have dedicated "entry-ports" to their national internet, through which interfacing with the global internet can take place in a controlled way, in a safe, separate space without fully surrendering control over their national digital spaces.
Sounds good.