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Magazine Article

Inside China's controversial mission to reinvent the internet

| Mar. 27, 2020

On a cool day late last September, half a dozen Chinese engineers walked into a conference room in the heart of Geneva's UN district with a radical idea. They had one hour to persuade delegates from more than 40 countries of their vision: an alternative form of the internet, to replace the technological architecture that has underpinned the web for half a century. 

Whereas today's internet is owned by everyone and no one, they were in the process of building something very different - a new infrastructure that could put power back in the hands of nation states, instead of individuals.