A recent report by military experts in the latest edition of the Strategic Studies Quarterly says the Internet will turn into a partitioned set of national networks instead of an open forum for ideas. That sure seems like a threat. Recent world events, after all, show the value of an open Internet.
But there’s more than nationalism working to “Balkanize” the Internet. There are three potential dividing forces, and any of them could be a disaster.
The most pervasive threat to the Internet is the erosion of online security. Malware and hacking have moved from being an annoyance to being the business of organized crime and even an instrument of national policy and attack. Protecting Internet users and critical infrastructure has spawned the notion of kill-switches or national gateways to keep out intruders. Improperly used and carried to extremes, security measures could make the global Internet into a bunch of isolated islands.
Then there’s the problem of the collapse of the economic framework of the Internet. What we know as “the Internet” is a vast and rather disorderly confederation of ISPs. The expansion in demand from dialup access to people wanting to stream 3DHD movies is challenging ISP profits. That means ISPs are looking to new revenue sources. AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) just announced bandwidth caps and excess charges for wireline broadband customers. Level 3 Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: LVLT) and Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) are involved in a persistent dispute over how movie traffic from
Netflix Inc. (Nasdaq: NFLX) is paid for across their connections.
Low profits are forcing smaller ISPs out, and bigger ones want to charge more or create their own content networks, letting the core of the Internet languish.
Finally, we have the issue of national censorship and access control. Nearly all countries have some regulation on content, but obviously some take censorship much further than others, preventing not only harmful speech, copyright infringement, and at least some forms of pornography and defamation, but also political dissent or even political research. Whether it’s intended to be so or not, the Internet is the best propaganda tool the world has ever known. That makes it an offensive propaganda threat and raises the defenses of nations that want to close their borders to ideas as much as, or more than, to travelers.
Laws are the reflection of governments, and they are operative while those governments last. Short of creating world revolution, we can’t hope to make the Internet a free haven for ideas everywhere. How would we enforce that requirement? Treaties? They’re violated daily. Courts? Who has jurisdiction and who would obey the verdict? War?
But what we could do here is to create a simple rule: Those who censor their Internet cannot connect to those who do not. If peering were structured and formalized, and if connecting into a censored national enclave would get ISPs sanctioned themselves, we might have a chance.
There are solutions to our other problems related to Balkanization, too. IPv6 could open the possibility of creating more orderly address and geographical mapping, making it easier to trace things like DDoS attacks and hacking. Laws could require ISPs to watch for botnet infections and cut off users who don’t clean their systems. We could establish the kind of traffic-based settlement for the Internet that’s common for other forms of public communication, to at least create a provably durable economic framework (though it’s not necessarily going to make streaming 3DHD free or cheap).
The problem is that all of these things would change the Internet, too. Should we try? Do we cut off nations for censoring, and their populations with them? Do we create security through measures that make us more accountable for online behavior? Shall we fix the economics of the Internet even if it means that we don’t get the combination of ever-growing online services and ever-declining online prices that we’d love to believe is ours by right?
That’s our policy choice, too. Shall we make it, or the other choices here, or put our heads in the sand and hope for the best? Recent events say it’s time for us to decide.
— Tom Nolle, software engineer and founder of CIMI Corp.
Very interesting article. Too bad I got here a week late. It'll be interesting to see how ISPs can continue to maintain their revenue streams flowing when it is obvious that the business model is not working. And if we add network neutrality into the mix, the ISPs are very limited and being carefully watched.
What do you think will be their next step? Following AT&T?
The best I could come up with for a Dr. Strangelove, Nuclear war equivalency in the internet era, is for the cyber warriors to finally bring so many neural networks to life, that on August 26, 2029, at 11:31 pm PDT, SKYNET becomes self aware. TERMINATOR III JUDGEMENT DAY!
I think that's one of our big challenges, Antonis. There are so many forces that impact the Internet because the Internet impacts so many people, business models, and behaviors. It's that complexity that creates the risk. Simple two-dimensional ecosystems (predator and prey) are easy to manage and predict. As you add interdependences, you create a ripple of effects for everything that happens, and it's easy to have something go truly astray without anyone intending that happen.
You could argue that governance is one of the big problems, because it makes it harder to develop a systemic view of what's happening or to address problems even if you somehow realize they're happening.
Thanks for the insider's look of Internet economics! Also, good points on governance/leadership! It looks that technical advancement is sometimes overshadowed by these issues! As always, different forces continue to shape the Internet!
That's an interesting question. The quintessential American Cowboy, Riding a nuclear tipped war weapon, while waving a white stetson, while headed into the middle of downtown Moscow, would be a pretty tough image to replace. A spam-bot or a DDoS just wouldn't quite make te same impression. I'll ponder this and let you know if I come up with anything.
Kurt, it's good to hear your virtual voice again! Certainly war would be the most likely way to "resolve" the issues, and I fear that at some point in the future we'll see a war or two fought on cyber issues, but I'd hope it won't be for a while.
I wonder, if we recast Dr. Strangelove into the Internet age, what Slim Pickins would be riding down in that memorable scene? Somehow photons or electrons or bits don't seem as dramatic.
Of the three options you mentioned in this post: Treaties, Courts and WAR!!! Only war seems to be the undeniable solution. So, I choose option 3. And to paraphrase General 'Buck' Turgidson, "Sir, Let me push the g*d d@mn button."(Dr.Strangelove)
Good question. It seems to me inevitable that because we don't have a working forum to arbitrate Internet issues and because the big operators will likely drive service-layer integration absent any alternative approaches, what will happen is that the ITU will take a larger role. Because the ITU is an element of the UN, it can also play a role in formalizing any treaties on settlement, etc. I would hope that this would reduce the role of ICANN (whatever that role is, in a utility sense).
The wild card here is the question of how a working agreement for "federation" of all levels of Internet services could develop. If the federation process grows out of the Internet itself, then the Internet as a community might control it. There are barriers to that; the IETF for example has consistently refused to take up commercial or regulatory issues and there's no Internet body that's really chartered to do either. If regulations and economics exert a significant pressure on service and infrastructure evolution, then things go by default to the players who are strongest in building and interconnecting, which are the major ISPs. Most of them are active in the ITU.
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