The fundamentals of the Internet - openness, freedom and anonymity - were all rocked this year, as the side effects of an open Web became apparent, says president of the US Internet Industry Association David McClure.
Speaking in Centurion yesterday, at the Internet Service Providers Association's annual iWeek conference, McClure outlined six ways in which the Internet has changed society.
“We set out in 1993 with commercial Internet to change the world, and we have, but we live with something called the law of unintended consequences, and right now that's what the Internet is facing.
“2011 was the year when the pendulum began to swing and we realised everything is not going quite as we thought,” said McClure.
The empire strikes back
The Internet has brought profound changes to the political landscape, he noted, saying it's now virtually impossible for a US candidate that's not Internet-savvy to get elected. “But government is striking back. It doesn't like not having control over something that plays such a powerful role in society.”
McClure points to the Internet shutdown in Egypt, following the social media-fuelled uprisings in January. “Government was able to shut down 88% of the Internet in Egypt earlier this year, although they couldn't capture the cellphones. We're beginning to see governments striking back, such as the Internet kill switch legislation that was considered in the US.”
The original cyber security Bill would have given president Barack Obama the ability to limit or shutdown Internet traffic in the case of a “cyber security emergency”. The Bill was later amended to remove this “kill switch”, replacing it with a more collaborative approach including private industry.
Another development McClure touched on was the WikiLeaks saga, noting that - while it did a great deal for transparency - it also had a downside. “WikiLeaks caused a lot of damage. Diplomats can no longer negotiate with any confidence that the content won't show up on some Web site. All discussions will have to take place in a glass house and the sense of privacy has been lost.
“The Internet, far from driving what we thought were new areas of transparency, is driving governments underground.”
Will they come?
In terms of infrastructure, McClure noted the focus has often been misplaced. “In 2011, we have a couple of realities we have to address. IPv6 will take a while to get here, so despite the constant worries that we're running out of Internet space, to lose sleep over IPv6 on your part and mine is a little premature.”
McClure called the concept of 4G cellular “a hoax”, saying it doesn't exist. “We don't actually have 4G; we have 3.5G maybe. But every two years, the cellular companies have to renew their plans and they need some shiny new thing to sell. So they went to ITU [International Telecommunications Union] and asked if what they had so far (essentially three and a bit) could be called 4G.”
He added that whatever improvements are brought in, it comes down to the fact that 34% of Americans are not using broadband. “You can build all the infrastructure you want, but if you can't show people how it touches their lives, they're not going to spend money on it - and it's like that all over the world.
“Just because you build it doesn't mean they will use it. The biggest challenge in Africa is going to be what to do when people don't use it.”
Theory to practice
Cyber crime is increasing dramatically, with virtually no major company in the world that hasn't suffered an attack, noted McClure. He added that more reporting is being done on incidents, because they're having significant economic impacts. “It's no longer just threatening to attack a company if they don't meet the criminal's demands. It's resulting in actual damage to the network, and as organisations try take out insurance against these attacks, insurers want this publicly reported on.”
McClure added that, while cyber war was theoretical a year ago, it's now very much a reality. “It's no longer about protecting government servers but about protecting your servers, because the access point isn't through the big ISPs anymore but through the smaller ones, which don't have the levels of protection needed. You have become the access point for national attacks, so you're going to be under more scrutiny from government.”
According to McClure, none of the major social networks have a viable business model - they depend on selling advertising. 'Your privacy comes at a very cheap price these days. The only way they can make money is to sell your content.
“We used to think the biggest threat to privacy was the government, but we were wrong. It's the advertisers. Privacy today doesn't exist. The anonymity that was a cornerstone of the Internet when it was founded is gone and we have yet to see what the ramifications of that will be.”
Death of culture
McClure argued that companies' race to protect their intellectual property is stifling modern culture, as Google tries to gain control over books with its digitisation project, the film industry exerts control over films, and the music industry does the same with music.
“If the copyright laws of today existed in the past, we would never have heard of Shakespeare or Mozart - we'd have no culture. It's being locked away in the vaults of companies who have no idea what to do with it.” He says the films of the early 21st Century have been lost because studios didn't want to release them to the public, but they also didn't preserve them.
Finally, when it comes to the Internet's effect on social norms, McClure noted the implications are yet to be seen. “Schools are abandoning the teaching of handwriting and we're seeing the decline of traditional media. Newspapers and TV stations are in a panic and we don't yet know what the ramifications of this will be.”
Social networks like Facebook have also transformed the way people communicate and interact. “What does it do when we no longer interface face-to-face? It's not necessarily negative - we're able to communicate in ways we never could before, but there are consequences we never intended to happen.
“In 2011, we realised the pendulum has begun to swing and that we need to address the Pandora's Box we've opened with the Internet.
“In many ways it's like bringing a child into the world. As proud as you are when they graduate, it doesn't mean there aren't going to be a few scraped knees along the way. The state of the Internet in 2011 is pretty good, but in the past year reality has set in for all of us, and we realised that with all the work we've done perhaps we were focusing on the wrong things. We were focusing on wires and networks, and we should have been looking at humans and governments and relationships.”
Share
