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Do we need a new Internet, a new society or a new government?

October 07, 2009

This is my English homework for tomorrow: a comment on a New York Times article.

According to specialists' opinions, the Internet designed decades ago is not up to today's requirements and needs a major redesign, states the New York Times article "Do we need a new Internet?". The loss of digital freedom, however, is only mentioned marginally, and how experts want to design something today for the challenges of tomorrow remains unclear.

The Conficker worm is mentioned as an example of how catastrophic Internet security really is. While it is true that there are many security threats "out there", the example also shows that the widespread use of the Windows operating system without all security updates installed remains the main problem. Also, there are cases where Microsoft doesn't provide such updates on time. These are mainly problems of a software monopoly, though, not the Internet itself.

Furthermore, the lack of centralised control is criticised. It is interesting how so-called "experts" on the subject overlook that the decentralised nature of the Internet is its essence, the basic idea behind it. This is where the huge and widespread acceptance comes from: the fact that no-one can control or restrict who you are communicating with. Security-related problems like authentication or data security have successfully been solved by mathematicians and IT specialists, and people all over the world are using the technology to prevent computers eavesdropping on the route between source and destination. Of course, the decentrality is a thorn in the entertainment industry's side: they are helplessly trying to enforce their copying restrictions on digital media, while another fundamental idea of the Internet, the task that almost every network device is running, is the duplication of data.

Tracking global criminality is another issue raised by the text. Governments seem to be unable to track criminals on the Internet, thus they cry out for new regulations, leading to laws like the EU directive on data retention or the German "child porn" filter. It is needless to say that neither saving communication data nor making the public look away from child abuse will help fight crimes. Crimes can be fought by experts of the executive in the real world, and that is rather effective without the need for tracing everyone on the Internet. These laws are just good for establishing surveillance that will slowly become reminiscent of Orwell's 1984. Luckily though, politicians are not technicians, and as they are unable to find effective ways of pursuing criminals in cyberspace, they are also unable to create effective censorship on the Internet.

A recent law suit against "The Pirate Bay" (a large filesharing search engine), where plaintiffs demanded taking the search engine off the Net, showed that computers treat a disconnection on purpose just like a connection error and find another available path. Out of this reason, some people might now argue that this is a proof of the Internet's ability to support crime. On the one hand, governments and the industry should think about such dramatic changes in people's behaviour and respect, not prohibit their intention to share content. On the other hand, the executive needs specialists who are able to pursue crime without putting the whole population under general suspicion or the need for secret censorship.

As long as military computers are vulnerable to attacks from the Internet and government computers are hacked, we can be sure of the fact that governmental organisations need more and better security experts. As long as most people are submitting private data on a public website like Facebook, it is sure that people still need more time to adapt to the newly established informational society. Redesigning the Internet without knowing where the journey has to go, while the "old" Internet is still too new for most people, seems like a bad idea to me.

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