TORONTO—In the future, people may look back on our time as the good ol' days when the Internet was open and free—at least in some parts of the world.
That’s the concern of Ronald Deibert, a co-founder of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) and one of the world’s foremost experts on the state of the Internet and the efforts of various players to either keep it open or close it off.
“We’re really at a threshold here,” he said after an event at the Munk School of Global Affairs in Toronto on Friday. That night, Deibert was joined by his colleagues to celebrate the publications of ONI’s latest book, Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace.
While groups like ONI and some big players including Google and the U.S. State Department are trying to keep cyberspace open, there are more forces trying to close it off, said Deibert, leaving him pessimistic that China’s big-brother type Internet could become more common.
“There are so many countervailing forces that if you were to ask me as a betting person, I kind of see this closure coming.”
