https://vimeo.com/522452949 Amid all the dents and formulaic verbiage that makes up the text of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan, is one particular piece of text that has largely passed observers and commentators by. And it reads like this: ‘’China will promote the establishment of a global Internet governance system that is multilateral, democratic and transparent’’. On the face of it nothing could be more innocuous. But that would be a major misreading of a very important piece of text. And the key to this, is the term multilateral. Currently global Internet governance operates under the multi-stakeholder system. In this system a wide variety of stakeholders get to determine how it works. But China wants to replace this very democratic and informal system with what it calls a multilateral system. In it national governments would determine how the Internet works. In effect China’s multilateral system would be a formula for an Internet…
