05 ISSUE VIII
OCTOBER 2025
OCTOBER 2025
Two Internets
In a factional global economy, digital platforms are contentious nodes of economic control between the US and China.
By Nolan Young
In 2018, the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, predicted that in the future, humanity would be split into two internets: one led by the United States and the other by China. The ormer US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has expressed concern about a potential “Economic Iron Curtain” forming between the US and China, especially around technology. He also added that as this digital bifurcation intensified, countries may have to choose one side or the other.
The TikTok saga is the most high-profile instance of this decoupling. The US government briefly banned TikTok and pressed ByteDance to divest its US assets. Then, in late September, news broke of a deal, pushed through by a Trump executive order, which would see U.S. investors take over a majority share of TikTok.
Image by Solen Feyissa, via Unsplash.
But when zooming out, TikTok is just one of many apps that have been segregated into one digital sphere or another. As tensions and economic delinking between China and the US escalate, internet platforms are being forced out of an increasingly untenable shared space. And beyond apps and platforms, this digital divergence is occurring on the level of infrastructure and hardware, semiconductors, AI, digital currencies, and beyond.
But what is driving this digital bifurcation?
A dominant interpretation in public discourse is that the Chinese state, in its paranoid authoritarianism, must restrict its citizens’ access to the free-flowing channels of information they would naturally find online. Thus, it is this impulse of the Chinese government to surveil, control, and quash political dissent that created their insulated digital sphere.
In this picture, the “Great Firewall” encloses a dark and artificial internet, separate from the open and free internet that is used by the rest of the world (barring a few other pariah states). Not only that, but through its “Digital Silk Road” project, China is enveloping other countries in its opaque and authoritarian internet. In the context of this encroachment, the US pursues initiatives like the 2021 Build Back Better World (B3W) Partnership with G-7 countries to build digital infrastructure to counter China’s Digital Silk Road.
However, from the perspective of the Chinese state, independence from Western technology and digital platforms is, among other things, a matter of sovereignty, survival, and hard power. Some Chinese scholars describe their nation’s digital endeavors as a project countering a Western “digital imperialism”. From this perspective, US big tech seeks to establish new global monopolies in digital production and exchange. Developing independent technological capacity is the only way to escape this chokehold and achieve a sovereign society. In this vision of the world, state stewardship of the digital realm is necessary.
But in the West, the Chinese internet is seen as inherently tainted by its ties to the state and its nefarious intentions. The central anxiety of the narrative about TikTok was not about a Chinese company holding Americans’ data, but that the CCP could. How can one trust a government with control over the digital sphere — especially one not held accountable by elections?
However, there is an inherent hypocrisy to this critique, given that state involvement in the digital economy is not exclusive to China.
There are ever-increasing examples of US state power merging with powerful technology companies. Most prominent are the long-standing but increasingly shameless ties between Silicon Valley and the US military. The data analytics firm Palantir, originally a military intelligence startup, now has deep ties to US federal and local agencies, providing software to the Los Angeles Police Department for a “predictive policing” program, to ICE to gather data on immigrants, as well as to the Israel Defense Force. But even traditional technology companies — including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle — have seen large procurement from the newly renamed Department of War.
Beyond the military uses of private tech capital, their powers are essential for maintaining global economic hegemony.
In the view of scholars Steve Rolf and Seth Schindler, digital platforms are uniquely powerful tools for states. In fact, beyond being mere tools, platforms serve as “programmable digital infrastructures,” and can be leveraged to control markets and infrastructural systems. Furthermore, digital infrastructures are easy to transport abroad as platforms, giving the US and China powerful control over foreign markets, as well as powers of digital governance. Platforms should not be thought of as one sector of the economy, but as the digital foundations of the whole global economy.
Rolf and Schindler are interested in the downstream effects of this merger of tech capital with state power. They use the term “state platform capitalism” to describe the increasingly muscular state intervention in the digital economy. By this, they mean how digital platforms have become increasingly co-opted by the governments of both the US and China — and employed for geopolitical and economic competition.
This trend of state platform capitalism, occurring in parallel in both the US and China, is what is splitting the internet in two.
Central to understanding the dynamics of digital bifurcation between the US and China is how different platforms, technologies, and infrastructures interact. These can be thought of as technological “stacks”. For example, you download a new app from the Apple App Store, which is hosted on Amazon Web Services’ server platform that relies on certain infrastructural hardware, et cetera. So, while another country may have its own version of a rideshare app, for example, this is far from technological independence. This app is absorbed into a larger technological “stack”— or, as Yanis Varoufakis describes it in his book TECHNOFEUDALISM, it operates within a “cloud fief” on a more powerful, neo-feudal digital lord.
Considering this concept of the technological stack, the forced sale of TikTok can be seen as an example of purging the US stack of Chinese-owned assets. In 2020, during Trump’s first term, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo outlined the bipartisan ‘Clean Network Initiative,’ which directly outlines this need to extricate from the US stack any elements that were deemed “threatening.”
It is within this context as well that the geopolitical competition in the digital sphere is unfolding. Both the US and China are seeking to bring other nations and economies into their respective stacks, which are becoming increasingly independent, and non-interoperable. (The World Economic Forum estimates that “70% of new value created over the coming decade will be based on digitally enabled platform business models.”)
Amidst this competitive expansion, it is vital to understand the distinct dynamics of each digital sphere on a material level, rather than resorting to concepts such as “digital authoritarianism.” Rolf and Schindler distinguish between the state-platform-capitalism of the US and China by comparing the involvement of state institutions, firms’ transnational orientations, and relationships with finance capital. For example, in the US case, we see lax regulation combined with the wielding of state power abroad to help platforms expand. Meanwhile, Chinese platform firms are rightly regulated domestically, but commercial interests primarily drive their expansion.
Ultimately, it may be unavoidable that we have two internets. In a global economy of emerging factionalism, digital platforms become sites of unprecedented power. Perhaps it was a naive exceptionalism — characteristic of an already faded era of US hegemony— to believe that there would only be one internet, and one pole of digital hegemony.
Then again, this hope still has a pulse thanks to the race for AI. The emergence of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a hypothetical, more advanced form of AI that does not exist yet, would radically shift the trends of digital development in unpredictable ways. Caught in this fervor to achieve the wonders of AGI and reverse the course of decaying hegemony, it is easy to ignore the reality that independent digital worlds are solidifying outside of US influence or control.
Nolan Young is an MA candidate in international affairs at The New School.