The globe works on the internet and there is a lot of competition in this aspect. We all need a good broadband connection to have a development in the 4th generation. There are competing visions of our digital future which have emerged from China and Silicon Valley.
If we keep all these things aside and think then the improvement and development in this 21st century can be known by the people using the internet. It depends on how people understand their own experiences and events in a wider world that can only be seen by the internet they use.
China produces vast amounts of personal data and blurs into a huge apparatus of state surveillance and censorship. The Chinese mostly use the method of e-commerce than plastic cards for paying purposes.
The e-commerce mixed Alibaba and Tencent who owns the WeChat, the platform used by more than a billion people every day. It is useful in many things like payments, social networking, messages, and travel bookings.
On the other side, there is another version of the internet that is revolving around the planet. It is around Google and Facebook. These have a lot of people’s personal information but express themselves as a different symbol of personal freedom and liberal values. They even embed the social model now known as surveillance capitalism.
Internet To Next Level
The question is which part will become prominent with not least among the half of humanity are not online. With Donald’s trump trade war it is not quite as simple as Chinese platforms slug it out with their U.S counterparts. This is more visible and particularly with the activities of the IT giant Huawei.
The investment by China in India and Africa is reaching high levels in terms of technology. The Alibaba is cross the exceptions with Amazon and also Uber with equivalent Didi. Particularly the mobile payment systems in China will make western countries stand.
While all this is going on the dominance of life in the west by corporations. Based in the US is being contested as never before. There Democratic presidential Elizabeth Warren wants Facebook, Google, and Amazon to shut down. The same is rising among more switched-on elements in Congress.
The new cold war and race to regulate are contexts in which the western will make changes to stand first in the competition. This will apply to Facebook. Where ten years back the CEO of Facebook proposed radical transparency and the world will be better placed if you start sharing.
Battle For The Internet
Now it is going to plan something different and a “privacy-based vision for social networking”. Facebook will remain the core of the western internet which will ready to be endlessly pushed into new global markets.
There was an announcement by the Zuckerberg CEO of Facebook about the privacy based communication platform that will become more important than the open platforms. This concept is taken from Snapchat where the post will delete automatically.
The convergence is here again, but the time is all about surveillance and companies so huge that they will involve in every part of our lives. If the 21st-century democracy and most basic ideas of citizenship are to mean anything, the western internet ought not to be converging with China but pulling it in the opposite direction.
