For their part, Schmidt and Cohen also warn against “ Internet balkanization ” whereby authoritarian state actors (China, Russia, Iran, federations of Sunni states, Texas, and so on) build virtual borders around their citizens, keeping them trapped in a closed bubble of sanctioned concepts, and sheltered from the enlightening waters of the global Internet provided by open platforms, such as Google. Under this deglobalization, the cosmopolitan potential of the Google Cloud model would be subverted and inverted by local “ traditional states ” jealous of their citizens ’ wandering attention. They explain the dynamic of Cloud versus state in the gentlest possible terms for a Western audience. The negative scenarios drawn include alternative DNS (Domain
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