26 October 2019 | New Scientist | 37O
NE sure sign of a mature technology is
that you only ever think about it when
it doesn’t work. You don’t consider the
pipes beneath your feet until your drain gets
blocked. Similarly, you don’t reflect on the
internet until your video call dies.
The internet’s foundational organisational
principle – that it has no organising principle –
has given it an unprecedented reach into our
lives. At least in theory, anyone can join it,
extend it, write software for it, make money
from it. As a result, today’s internet isn’t just
about emails, Facebook updates and hours
and hours of Netflix. Information exchange
through it has come to underpin essential
everyday services from power grids to public
transport. Without it, the world we know
would stop.
Today, the internet is continuing to grow
apace, as gaps in its global coverage are closed
and ever more devices are connected to it, from
smartwatches to cars and even refrigerators.
Yet at the same time, the very principles of
openness that underpin it are under threat
from an unholy coalition of government,
commercial and other interests. The question
is whether that is necessarily all a bad thing.
Might a more closed, better regulated internet
actually be in all our interests?
An example of the threats the internet
currently faces came with a message on 12 June
this year on the Twitter account of internet
messaging app Telegram. It announced
that “GADZILLIONS of garbage requests”
had knocked out its network. Telegram’s
end-to-end encryption makes it popular with
privacy-minded users. This huge “distributed
denial of service” attack came at the height of
street protests in Hong Kong against mainland
China’s attempt to gain greater control. The
company later said that the attack appeared
to have been orchestrated from China.
If so, it wouldn’t have been the first time:
in 2015, a similar attack on a US website hosting
anti-censorship software seems to have come
from the same location. The possibility ofwaging this sort of cyberwarfare is a
consequence of the internet’s open, borderless
structure. Ransomware like NotPetya or
WannaCry, which took computer systems
around the world hostage in 2017, is another
favoured tool. Once released, such software
can spread like wildfire in open grassland
through the internet’s distributed nodes.
Cyberwarfare is the stated reason why
Vladimir Putin’s government wants to follow
China’s lead and erect borders around Russia’s
portion of the internet. A “sovereign internet”
bill, passed earlier this year, requires telecoms
companies to monitor and filter all internet
traffic passing into Russia, and proposes an
off switch to separate the country from the rest
of the world during a cyberattack. The details
are still hazy. China has been building barriers
since the internet arrived there, but Russia’s
internet is well-connected. Cutting itself off
will probably involve the state taking over
Russia’s internet service providers – a power
with obvious potential for abuse.One country, two systems
China is certainly clear in its antiglobalist
internet vision. In 2015, it hosted what it billed
as the second World Internet Conference. In
an opening address, president Xi Jinping said:
“We should respect the right of individual
countries to independently choose their own
path of cyber development.”
In fact more or less everyone is begining to
do this in their different ways. The European
Union’s General Data Protection Regulation,
or the GDPR, came into effect in May 2018 to
strengthen the privacy rights of internet
users and limit the power of tech companies
over EU citizens’ data. Rather than comply with
the stipulations, certain websites have instead
just blocked access to European visitors.
In the US, the central principle of net
neutrality – that no data is privileged over any
other as it passes through the internet – is under
threat. Rules adopted in 2015 mandating theRight from the beginning, the
internet has had its shadowlands:
parts of the network deliberately
hidden from public view. The
original “dark net” comprised
nodes on ARPANET that received
messages but didn’t appear in
network lists, or acknowledge
or respond to messages. Today,
perhaps the most prominent
example of the dark net is the
Tor network, which enables users
to disguise their identities and
communicate anonymously.
An acronym for “the onion router”,
Tor involves layers of encryption,
analogous to the layers of an onion,
that let someone send data without
their computer’s unique IP address
being revealed.
Just as the internet is often
confused with the web, the dark
net is often muddled with the deep
web, the parts of the web that
aren’t typically indexed by search
engines such as Google. That has
many legitimate uses. Indeed,
most of us are part of the deep
web if we use webmail, a company
intranet or a restricted-access
social-media profile.
The dark net and Tor are most
often associated in people’s minds
with illicit trading in commodities
like drugs and arms on online
markets such as the now-shuttered
Silk Road. But the anonymity the
dark net affords can also facilitate
whistle-blowing and protect users
living under authoritarian regimes
from censorship – a not
inconsiderable boon, given the
pressures the internet is under
today (see “Open or closed”, right).
Donna LuTHE DARK SIDE
The idea of one, unified, global internet is under threat.
How much should we care, asks Douglas Heaven
Open or closed?
gigabytes of data will pass
between IP addresses in 2022,three times the amount in 2017
SOURCE: CISCO
4.8 trillion
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