Warring for the soul of the internet: Ten years on – Atlantic Council
Men walk in front of a screen at the World Internet Conference (WIC) in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, China, October 20, 2019. REUTERS/Aly Song
The spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet. In a landmark speech delivered ten years ago at the NewseumWashingtons shrine to the First AmendmentUS Secretary of State Hillary Clinton foreshadowed the internets potential to improve human life. Drawing a contrast between the State Departments work on internet freedom and oppositional efforts around the world to destroy it, Clinton continued, principles like information freedom arent just good policy, not just somehow connected to our national values, but they are universal.
Yet these words arrived at a starkly different time inhistory: before Edward Snowdens leaks about globe-spanning US surveillanceprograms, before a social media-infused Arab Spring prompted authoritarianinternet crackdowns, and before people around the world began to recognize how muchthey could be tracked and hacked through the internet. Democracies were muchmore hopeful about a fair, free, and open global internet than many are today.
A decade later, the Newseum has shuttered and the idealsof an open internet are under assault. The new reality is one where democraciesmust play a more assertive role to protect an open, free, fair, and secure internet,utilizing a strategy that recognizes the changes the internet has undergone,the pernicious influence of authoritarian states, and the role companies havein both protecting and fragmenting it. The internet cant be brought back intime but there is hope, perhaps, that its original core values can be preservedin a new form through determined effort by its users, some companies, and thedemocratic states where the open web was born.
The world faces great challenges in how authoritarian regimes undermine internet principles long heralded by liberal democraciesfreedom, openness, interoperability, security, resilience. Efforts by the Chinese state to provide for control, if not outright censorship, of every byte of data flowing across national networks tore at the fabric of a global internet. The effectiveness of this domestic information control prompted copycats to attempt construction of their own cyber control systems in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Iran. The political and digital logic behind this regime of censorship and information control helped articulate an ideological counterweight to the open internet.
But there is more to the story than China; politicaland economic decisions made within liberal democracies helped pull this networkapart. The internet as we know is in its fourth generation and with eachsuccessive decade becomes more closed, its ownership more concentrated, andleaves users with less control over what was once their network.
Borne of a research project, the internets firstbroadly accessible generation came online in 1983 with many of the sametechnical protocols in use today. In its earliest form, the internet was atext-based information network with a high barrier to entry for novice users. Earlyresearch and non-commercial networks were slowly decommissioned, browsers matured,and sites like eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo grew as part of the e-commercerevolution powering the internets second generation.
Along with e-commerce platforms came a slow but steadyadvance of tracking and advertising delivery networkssurveillance, of a corporatekind, to profile users and tailor ads and services accordingly. Thesetechnologies, often situated in a Silicon Valley culture of ruthless andpersistent innovation, drove features before security and strained the informalnetworks of trust integral to the internets gestation. Simultaneously it wasdemocracies, including France and Germany, that implemented some of theearliest efforts to link internet addresses with physical locations. Bothstates cared a great deal where things like Nazi memorabilia were being soldand took steps to block these transactions in their jurisdictions. This secondgeneration of the internet had already begun to fuse the virtual and physicaldomains.
With the birth of cloud computing in the 2006 launchof Amazon Web Services, the internet entered a third generationone which wouldbe characterized by increasing concentration of computing and networking power.Cloud provider giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google built vast computationalresources and drove massive amounts of traffic flying between their datacenters. Demand for cloud services grew, and so did the power of theseproviders. Microsoft and others have built undersea internet cables to handlethe increasing traffic between their facilities, for example, while Google haseven developed a replacement for one of the internets core protocols (QUIC),implementing it years before any global governing body accepted or approved thestandard. The 2018 expulsion of the widely used encrypted communications app,Signal, from Google and Amazons clouds, where it had received protection fromcensorship by authoritarian states, underlined a troubling consequence of thisconcentration.
The spread of social media, and subsequent explosion of disinformation and other online harms like hate speech has occasioned the internets fourth and current generationthe rise of platform companies. What cloud computing did for the internets networking and computing architecture, social media did for information; large companies drove new features and seamless association of ever-greater amounts of information across a global user base. Information freedom increasingly moved into corporate hands.
Across each generation, the internets pool ofstakeholders has shrunk. The network as a whole has become less open. Whereonce intelligence sat at the edge of the network, it has slowly become morecentralized. Alongside the censorship and surveillance regimes of authoritarianstates, a small set of companies has begun to exert tremendous influence overthe shape and composition of the internet. None of this suggests the influenceis necessarily malicious; it is a product of broad commercial demand for thesecompanies services. But the result is the same: strengthening a handful ofcompanies in the middle of the network at the expense of the networks edge anda concentration of power into organizations whose decision-making lacks clear democraticlegitimacy.
In hindsight, the Secretarys speech in part missed, andin part got wrong, the promise of a democratic internet model in the face ofthe its growing risks. But there is hope; together users and democracies andeven some companies can reinvest in a free, fair, open, and secure network fornext generation of the internet. Democracies should support non-profittechnical bodies and companies to more expeditiously protect the internetscore technical protocols like Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Domain NameSystem (DNS) from abuse. Governments across the United States, European Union,and elsewhere can invest resources to work with internet swingstates to preserve the content freedoms that Americans fromStanford and Berkeley saw in the webs DNA. Through all of this, democraciesmust recognize something else mentioned little at the Newseum ten years ago:the dual role technology companies will play in cyberspaces future.
For while the internet was once heralded as acorporate-less democratic utopia, a handful of companies who build and selltechnology have the capacity to influence of much of the internet; at once arisk to, and critical partner in defending, the positive vision of a networkwhose design, access, and content reflects a fair, free, open, and secureethos. The internet of today is not what it was even ten years ago, but thefight is on to save something of its original soul in whatever form it takes adecade from now.
Trey Herr, PhD, is director of the Atlantic Councils Cyber Statecraft Initiative under the Scowcroft Center.
Justin Sherman (@jshermcyber) is a fellow with the Atlantic Councils Cyber Statecraft Initiative.
Tue, Jan 7, 2020
Irans government will feel the need to retaliate against the United States, but it does not wish to ignite a prolonged war with the United States. The regimes near-term aim is to demonstrate to its domestic and regional constituencies that it has the capability and the resolve to avenge Soleimanis killing and, more strategically, to drum up support for hardliners ahead of legislative elections next month. While Iran has a number of options available, its cyber toolkit not one to be overlooked.
New AtlanticistbySimon Handler, Will Loomis, and Katherine Wolff
Mon, Dec 16, 2019
While the Internet of Things offers a range of humanitarian, commercial, and national security benefits, its pervasive nature has many concerned over its impacts on safety and security in society. In a new report by the Atlantic Councils Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, Karl Rauscher notes that the worlds two largest powers are at a crossroads with regard to their level and scope of cooperation in continued IoT advances. United StatesChina Collaboration on the Internet of Things Safety: Whats Next? analyzes possibilities for the United States and China to work together to establish consensus policies and standards to make their societies safer and provide a model for the world.
ReportbyKarl Frederick Rauscher
Wed, Oct 9, 2019
The Kazakh case serves as an example of irresponsible cyber statecraft, when governments use cyberspace and technological tools to achieve specific political goals, placing the rights of citizens, as well as their political legitimacy, on the line.
New AtlanticistbySafa Shahwan
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Warring for the soul of the internet: Ten years on - Atlantic Council