The idea is called Cybersovereignty and it's already spreading around the world.

This is your Bloomberg QuickTake on the new Cyber Cold War.

Welcome!

It's the new millennium, and a simpler time for the internet.

Western tech pioneers proclaim it's a borderless force for transparency and individual freedom.

But fast forward to now

and that's being challenged like never before.

A massive cyber attack affecting nearly 50 million Facebook users.

And it was my mistake, and I'm sorry.

Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched.

You want to win a war, you need weapons for that.

And we could build them.

There's been a global backlash against Facebook, Google, WhatsApp.

This backlash coincides with the rise of the Chinese model.

Today you have governments from Russia to Southeast Asia saying, hang on, we get to control content on the internet

and at the same time there is not an impediment to stunning economic growth.

It's an ideological coup and a rejection

of the American internet model, which promised to spur

innovation and freedom.

Now China is offering a different vision: both internet control and tech innovation, and it has fans.

Today, there would be a growing number of people

who would argue that controlling the flow of information

across the internet does not actually impede innovation.

The crux of the Chinese internet model is based around the nation state.

Setting your own rules for your own citizens

that can't be circumvented by the internet.

So very simply, they want to control

what sort of content is hosted on the internet

that's available to Chinese users

and they want absolute control over that content.

So if they decide, for instance, that they don't want

any references to the Tiananmen Massacre from 1989,

then they will scrub that out of every website and every app

within the country that Chinese or consumers can see.

And this controlled, moderated version of the internet

is spreading, especially across Southeast Asia.

Vietnam's controversial version

of the Chinese internet model went into effect in 2019.

It demands the data of Vietnamese users

is kept in the country.

Indonesia, Southeast Asia's largest economy,

already requires data to be stored locally.

The Philippines has stepped up

what critics call a media crackdown

and one of the latest to buy into the rationale

is Thailand, which passed a cyber security bill

modeled on China's.

Southeast Asia is the testing ground for Chinese ambitions.

The region is home to more than half a billion people

whose internet economy is expected to triple

to 240 billion dollars by 2025.

I think a lot of Chinese companies,

and potentially Beijing itself,

see Southeast Asia as the first step in

expanding their influence globally

but that's when the digital Cold War kind of differs from

the Cold War we're familiar with.

In this case, I think countries are adopting

the Chinese style model without necessarily subscribing

to Beijing's style of government and/or Beijing's agenda.

China's version of the internet is appealing

to other nations who want to control

what their populations see and hear,

but it doesn't mean China's calling the shots.

Instead it could create an unprecedented bifurcation

of the internet, effectively ending our notion

of a truly worldwide web,

meaning what information you can easily access

would depend on where you are

and what that government decides you should know.