The second form of splintering would be to use the same protocols, but with different governing bodies.
If Russia, China, or other countries formed rivals to the bodies that manage the internet, it would be harder to put them back together. The politics of reconnection would be almost impossible because of vested interests.
The problem of connecting disparate networks into one global internet is often a political one, not a technical one.
There are steps short of a full splintering of the internet that could still have a significant effect on the functioning of the internet in a pariah state.
Some services have quasi-infrastructure type status because of the nature of the internet. Amazon Web Services runs so much of the back end of the internet that it can't be banned from certain areas. A lot of services would be temporarily disrupted by cutting off access to the repository.
Russia has been trying to make official and public sites use.ru and minimize the use of overseas service providers to mitigate the risk. During the panic of the week, some took this to be an instruction to all Russian websites, leading to alarmist articles suggesting that Russia planned to cut itself off from the internet entirely.
The internet has been mitigated by other countries and groups. The EU wants to require all data to be processed within its borders, a move that US tech giants are fiercely resisting.
Iran has built up national connections between its key online institutions, which will allow it to operate a sort of Iran-only functional internet should it need to close itself off from the global network or if it got kicked off by an adversary.
China has a complex relationship with the internet. Almost all online services used by people within China are Chinese companies. The country has a huge and regular form of online censorship called the Great Firewall of China.
The relationship between GreatFire and the global internet has changed over time due to the fact that Charlie Smith is operating in China.
The service-level blocking was initially driven by pure censorship needs. There were gaps in the market that could be blamed on the government.
Even though these Chinese companies might not be well-established outside of China, they helped to fill those gaps and created companies that are as valuable as their Western counterparts.
Smith thinks that China could be cut off from the internet, but it's not in its interests to do so.
I think China could cut itself off from the global internet if there was a big enough domestic crisis. There is a Chinese diaspora in the world. Nobody wants their home connections to be cut off. Businesses will still sell their products overseas.
China is taking senior positions on the internet's various governing bodies, as befits a country with more than a billion internet users, and is trying for now to slowly bend the standards, rules, and protocols to suit itself.
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James Ball is the global editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and author of "The Tangled Web We Weave: Inside the Shadow System That Shapes the Internet"
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