CHEN Shuai, GUO Qiquan, GAO Chundong, HAO Mengmeng, JIANG Dong
The cyberspace has become the "fifth strategic domain" after the land, the sea, the air and the space, providing a new platform for geopolitical games. The developed countries dominate the formulation of cyberspace rules and hold a large portion of cyberspace strategic resources, leaving a huge gap of the global cyberspace development. This paper makes a social network analysis by using the Lorenz curve to quantitatively describe the pattern and the current allocation of the global cyberspace resources. It is shown that the physical infrastructures of the cyberspace, such as the submarine cables, the Internet data centers and the Internet exchange points, are mainly located in Europe and North America. The convergence of the submarine cables in specific areas has formed several major "points of the throat" for the Internet data traffic, namely, the Luzon Strait, the Malacca Strait, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Mantel Strait. Egypt, the United States, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and Cote d'Ivoire play key roles in the entire network structure, carrying a large amount of Internet data traffic; in terms of virtual resources in the cyberspace, there is also a serious uneven distribution, with a small population in Europe and the United States sharing most of the network resources. China has come out of the backward situation in the field of IPv6, but there is still a large distance to go for the development in the future. This paper puts forward corresponding policy recommendations in terms of the construction of the cyberspace infrastructure such as the submarine cables and the data centers, and the virtual resources in the global cyberspace. Besides, this study emphasizes the needs to defend cyberspace sovereignty and national security, strengthen the research and application of new cybersecurity technologies, draw the geographical map of cyberspace, and improve the capability of national cybersecurity assurance.
