[AfrICANN-discuss] The future of the internet

[Anne-Rachel Inné]

http://www.economist.com/node/16941635



*The future of the internet*

*A virtual counter-revolution*
The internet has been a great unifier of people, companies and online
networks. Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it

Sep 2nd 2010

A fragmenting virtual world

THE first internet boom, a decade and a half ago, resembled a religious
movement. Omnipresent cyber-gurus, often framed by colourful PowerPoint
presentations reminiscent of stained glass, prophesied a digital paradise in
which not only would commerce be frictionless and growth exponential, but
democracy would be direct and the nation-state would no longer exist. One,
John-Perry Barlow, even penned “A Declaration of the Independence of
Cyberspace”.

Even though all this sounded Utopian when it was preached, it reflected
online reality pretty accurately. The internet was a wide-open space, a new
frontier. For the first time, anyone could communicate electronically with
anyone else—globally and essentially free of charge. Anyone was able to
create a website or an online shop, which could be reached from anywhere in
the world using a simple piece of software called a browser, without asking
anyone else for permission. The control of information, opinion and commerce
by governments—or big companies, for that matter—indeed appeared to be a
thing of the past. “You have no sovereignty where we gather,” Mr Barlow
wrote.

The lofty discourse on “cyberspace” has long changed. Even the term now
sounds passé. Today another overused celestial metaphor holds sway: the
“cloud” is code for all kinds of digital services generated in warehouses
packed with computers, called data centres, and distributed over the
internet. Most of the talk, though, concerns more earthly matters: privacy,
antitrust, Google’s woes in China, mobile applications, green information
technology (IT). Only Apple’s latest iSomethings seem to inspire religious
fervour, as they did again this week.

Again, this is a fair reflection of what is happening on the internet.
Fifteen years after its first manifestation as a global, unifying network,
it has entered its second phase: it appears to be balkanising, torn apart by
three separate, but related forces.

First, governments are increasingly reasserting their sovereignty. Recently
several countries have demanded that their law-enforcement agencies have
access to e-mails sent from BlackBerry smart-phones. This week India, which
had threatened to cut off BlackBerry service at the end of August, granted
RIM, the device’s maker, an extra two months while authorities consider the
firm’s proposal to comply. However, it has also said that it is going after
other communication-service providers, notably Google and Skype.

Second, big IT companies are building their own digital territories, where
they set the rules and control or limit connections to other parts of the
internet. Third, network owners would like to treat different types of
traffic differently, in effect creating faster and slower lanes on the
internet.

It is still too early to say that the internet has fragmented into
“internets”, but there is a danger that it may splinter along geographical
and commercial boundaries. (The picture above is a visual representation of
the “nationality” of traffic on the internet, created by the University of
California’s Co-operative Association for Internet Data Analysis: America is
in pink, Britain in dark blue, Italy in pale blue, Sweden in green and
unknown countries in white.) Just as it was not preordained that the
internet would become one global network where the same rules applied to
everyone, everywhere, it is not certain that it will stay that way, says
Kevin Werbach, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania.

To grasp why the internet might unravel, it is necessary to understand how,
in the words of Mr Werbach, “it pulled itself together” in the first place.
Even today, this seems like something of a miracle. In the physical world,
most networks—railways, airlines, telephone systems—are collections of more
or less connected islands. Before the internet and the world wide web came
along, this balkanised model was also the norm online. For a long time, for
instance, AOL and CompuServe would not even exchange e-mails.

Economists point to “network effects” to explain why the internet managed to
supplant these proprietary services. Everybody had strong incentives to
join: consumers, companies and, most important, the networks themselves (the
internet is in fact a “network of networks”). The more the internet grew,
the greater the benefits became. And its founding fathers created the basis
for this virtuous circle by making it easy for networks to hook up and for
individuals to get wired.

Yet economics alone do not explain why the internet rather than a
proprietary service prevailed (as Microsoft did in software for personal
computers, or PCs). One reason may be that the rapid rise of the internet,
originally an obscure academic network funded by America’s Department of
Defence, took everyone by surprise. “The internet was able to develop
quietly and organically for years before it became widely known,” writes
Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard University, in his 2008 book, “The
Future of the Internet—And How To Stop It”. In other words, had telecoms
firms, for instance, suspected how big it would become, they might have
tried earlier to change its rules.

Whatever the cause, the open internet has been a boon for humanity. It has
not only allowed companies and other organisations of all sorts to become
more efficient, but enabled other forms of production, notably “open source”
methods, in which groups of people, often volunteers, all over the world
develop products, mostly pieces of software, collectively. Individuals have
access to more information than ever, communicate more freely and form
groups of like-minded people more easily.

Even more important, the internet is an open platform, rather than one built
for a specific service, like the telephone network. Mr Zittrain calls it
“generative”: people can tinker with it, creating new services and elbowing
existing ones aside. Any young company can build a device or develop an
application that connects to the internet, provided it follows certain,
mostly technical conventions. In a more closed and controlled environment,
an Amazon, a Facebook or a Google would probably never have blossomed as it
did.


*Forces of fragmentation*

However, this very success has given rise to the forces that are now pulling
the internet apart. The cracks are most visible along geographical
boundaries. The internet is too important for governments to ignore. They
are increasingly finding ways to enforce their laws in the digital realm.
The most prominent is China’s “great firewall”. The Chinese authorities are
using the same technology that companies use to stop employees accessing
particular websites and online services. This is why Google at first decided
to censor its Chinese search service: there was no other way to be widely
accessible in the country.

But China is by no means the only country erecting borders in cyberspace.
The Australian government plans to build a firewall to block material
showing the sexual abuse of children and other criminal or offensive
content. The OpenNet Initiative, an advocacy group, lists more than a dozen
countries that block internet content for political, social and security
reasons. They do not need especially clever technology: governments go
increasingly after dominant online firms because they are easy to get hold
of. In April Google published the numbers of requests it had received from
official agencies to remove content or provide information about users.
Brazil led both counts (see chart 1).

Not every request or barrier has a sinister motive. Australia’s firewall is
a case in point, even if it is a clumsy way of enforcing the law. It would
be another matter, however, if governments started tinkering with the
internet’s address book, the Domain Name System (DNS). This allows the
network to look up the computer on which a website lives. If a country
started its own DNS, it could better control what people can see. Some fear
this is precisely what China and others might do one day.

To confuse matters, the DNS is already splintering for a good reason. It was
designed for the Latin alphabet, which was fine when most internet users
came from the West. But because more and more netizens live in other parts
of the world—China boasts 420m—last October the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers, the body that oversees the DNS, allowed domain
names entirely in other scripts. This makes things easier for people in,
say, China, Japan or Russia, but marks another step towards the
renationalisation of the internet.

Many media companies have already gone one step further. They use another
part of the internet’s address system, the “IP numbers” that identify
computers on the network, to block access to content if consumers are not in
certain countries. Try viewing a television show on Hulu, a popular American
video service, from Europe and it will tell you: “We’re sorry, currently our
video library can only be streamed within the United States.” Similarly,
Spotify, a popular European music-streaming service, cannot be reached from
America.

Yet it is another kind of commercial attempt to carve up the internet that
is causing more concern. Devotees of a unified cyberspace are worried that
the online world will soon start looking as it did before the internet took
over: a collection of more or less connected proprietary islands reminiscent
of AOL and CompuServe. One of them could even become as dominant as
Microsoft in PC software. “We’re heading into a war for control of the web,”
Tim O’Reilly, an internet savant who heads O’Reilly Media, a publishing
house, wrote late last year. “And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a
war against the web as an interoperable platform.”

The trend to more closed systems is undeniable. Take Facebook, the web’s
biggest social network. The site is a fast-growing, semi-open platform with
more than 500m registered users. Its American contingent spends on average
more than six hours a month on the site and less than two on Google. Users
have identities specific to Facebook and communicate mostly via internal
messages. The firm has its own rules, covering, for instance, which
third-party applications may run and how personal data are dealt with.

Apple is even more of a world apart. From its iPhone and iPad, people mostly
get access to online services not through a conventional browser but via
specialised applications available only from the company’s “App Store”.
Granted, the store has lots of apps—about 250,000—but Apple nonetheless
controls which ones make it onto its platform. It has used that power to
keep out products it does not like, including things that can be construed
as pornographic or that might interfere with its business, such as an app
for Google’s telephone service. Apple’s press conference to show off its new
wares on September 1st was streamed live over the internet but could be seen
only on its own devices.

Even Google can be seen as a platform unto itself, if a very open one. The
world’s biggest search engine now offers dozens of services, from news
aggregation to word processing, all of which are tied together and run on a
global network of dozens of huge data-centres. Yet Google’s most important
service is its online advertising platform, which serves most text-based ads
on the web. Being the company’s main source of revenue, critics say, it is
hardly a model of openness and transparency.

There is no conspiracy behind the emergence of these platforms. Firms are in
business to make money. And such phenomena as social networks and online
advertising exhibit strong network effects, meaning that a dominant market
leader is likely to emerge. What is more, most users these days are not
experts, but average consumers, who want secure, reliable products. To
create a good experience on mobile devices, which more and more people will
use to get onto the internet, hardware, software and services must be more
tightly integrated than on PCs.


*Net neutrality, or not?*

Discussion of these proprietary platforms is only beginning. A lot of ink,
however, has already been spilt on another form of balkanisation: in the
plumbing of the internet. Most of this debate, particularly in America, is
about “net neutrality”. This is one of the internet’s founding principles:
that every packet of data, regardless of its contents, should be treated the
same way, and the best effort should always be made to forward it.

Proponents of this principle want it to become law, out of concern that
network owners will breach it if they can. Their nightmare is what Tim Wu, a
professor at Columbia University, calls “the Tony Soprano vision of
networking”, alluding to a television series about a mafia family. If
operators were allowed to charge for better service, they could extort
protection money from every website. Those not willing to pay for their data
to be transmitted quickly would be left to crawl in the slow lane. “Allowing
broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would
fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the internet such a
success,” said Vinton Cerf, one of the network’s founding fathers (who now
works for Google), at a hearing in Congress.

Opponents of the enshrining of net neutrality in law—not just
self-interested telecoms firms, but also experts like Dave Farber, another
internet elder—argue that it would be counterproductive. Outlawing
discrimination of any kind could discourage operators from investing to
differentiate their networks. And given the rapid growth in file-sharing and
video (see chart 2), operators may have good reason to manage data flows,
lest other traffic be crowded out.

The issue is not as black and white as it seems. The internet has never been
as neutral as some would have it. Network providers do not guarantee a
certain quality of service, but merely promise to do their best. That may
not matter for personal e-mails, but it does for time-sensitive data such as
video. What is more, large internet firms like Amazon and Google have long
redirected traffic onto private fast lanes that bypass the public internet
to speed up access to their websites.

Whether such preferential treatment becomes more widespread, and even
extortionary, will probably depend on the market and how it is regulated. It
is telling that net neutrality has become far more politically controversial
in America than it has elsewhere. This is a reflection of the relative lack
of competition in America’s broadband market. In Europe and Japan, “open
access” rules require network operators to lease parts of their networks to
other firms on a wholesale basis, thus boosting competition. A study
comparing broadband markets, published in 2009 by Harvard University’s
Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, found that countries with such rules
enjoy faster, cheaper broadband service than America, because the barrier to
entry for new entrants is much lower. And if any access provider starts
limiting what customers can do, they will defect to another.

America’s operators have long insisted that open-access requirements would
destroy their incentive to build fast, new networks: why bother if you will
be forced to share it? After intense lobbying, America’s telecoms regulators
bought this argument. But the lesson from elsewhere in the industrialised
world is that it is not true. The result, however, is that America has a
small number of powerful network operators, prompting concern that they will
abuse their power unless they are compelled, by a net-neutrality law, to
treat all traffic equally. Rather than trying to mandate fairness in this
way—net neutrality is very hard to define or enforce—it makes more sense to
address the underlying problem: the lack of competition.

It should come as no surprise that the internet is being pulled apart on
every level. “While technology can gravely wound governments, it rarely
kills them,” Debora Spar, president of Barnard College at Columbia
University, wrote several years ago in her book, “Ruling the Waves”. “This
was all inevitable,” argues Chris Anderson, the editor of *Wired*, under the
headline “The Web is Dead” in the September issue of the magazine. “A
technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then
someone finds a way to own it, locking out others.”

Yet predictions are hazardous, particularly in IT. Governments may yet
realise that a freer internet is good not just for their economies, but also
for their societies. Consumers may decide that it is unwise to entrust all
their secrets to a single online firm such as Facebook, and decamp to less
insular alternatives, such as Diaspora.

Similarly, more open technology could also still prevail in the mobile
industry. Android, Google’s smart-phone platform, which is less closed than
Apple’s, is growing rapidly and gained more subscribers in America than the
iPhone in the first half of this year. Intel and Nokia, the world’s biggest
chipmaker and the biggest manufacturer of telephone handsets, are pushing an
even more open platform called MeeGo. And as mobile devices and networks
improve, a standards-based browser could become the dominant access software
on the wireless internet as well.

Stuck in the slow lane

If, however, the internet continues to go the other way, this would be bad
news. Should the network become a collection of proprietary islands accessed
by devices controlled remotely by their vendors, the internet would lose
much of its “generativity”, warns Harvard’s Mr Zittrain. Innovation would
slow down and the next Amazon, Google or Facebook could simply be, well,
Amazon, Google or Facebook.

The danger is not that these islands become physically separated, says
Andrew Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota. There is just
too much value in universal connectivity, he argues. “The real question is
how high the walls between these walled gardens will be.” Still, if the
internet loses too much of its universality, cautions Mr Werbach of the
Wharton School, it may indeed fall apart, just as world trade can collapse
if there is too much protectionism. Theory demonstrates that interconnected
networks such as the internet can grow quickly, he explains—but also that
they can dissolve quickly. “This looks rather unlikely today, but if it
happens, it will be too late to do anything about it.”
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