Are We Headed For 200 Separate Nationally-Controlled Internets? (thehill.com) 80
Roger Cochetti directed internet public policy for IBM from 1994 through 2000 and later served as Senior Vice-President & Chief Policy Officer for VeriSign and Group Policy Director for CompTIA. This week he warned about signs "that the once open, global internet is slowly being replaced by 200, nationally-controlled, separate internets."
And, while these separate American, Chinese, Russian, Australian, European, British, and other "internets" may decide to have some things in common with each other, the laws of political gravity will slowly pull them further apart as interest groups in each country lobby for their own concerns within their own country. Moreover, we will probably see the emergence of a global alternate internet before long...
As background, it's important to recognize that — by almost any measure — the global internet is controlled by businesses and non-profits subject to the jurisdiction of the United States government. Within a roughly 1,000-mile strip of land stretching from San Diego to Seattle lie most major internet businesses and network control or standards bodies (and those that aren't there likely lie elsewhere in the United States). So — as the governments of China, Russia and Iran never tire of explaining — while Americans constitute around 310 million out of the world's 4.3 billion internet users (around 8%), the U.S. government exercises influence or control over more than 70% of the internet's controls and services... China's ability to control the internet experience within its bordersx` between roughly 2005 and 2018 taught many other countries that doing so, even if costly, is possible. This lesson was not lost on Russia, Iran, Australia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the EU and many other countries, which began developing legal (and sometimes technical) means to control internet content within their borders. This legal/technical nationalization over the past decade was significantly boosted by the realization that it was actually not very difficult for a government to substantially shut down the internet within a territory...
The first major step in the introduction of a new, China-centric internet may have taken place last year when China introduced to the UN's International Telecommunications Union a proposal for a new type of protocol that would connect networks in a way comparable to, but different from, the way that the internet protocols have done. This was quickly dubbed China's New IP, and it has been the subject of major controversy as the nations and companies decide how to react. Whether a new Chinese-centric internet is based on a new series of protocols or is simply based on a new set of internet domain names and numbers, it seems likely that this alternate internet will give national governments quite a bit more control over what happens within their territories than does the global, open internet. This feature will attract quite a few national governments to join in — not least Russia, Iran and perhaps Turkey and India.
The combined market power of those participating countries would make it difficult for any global internet business to avoid such a new medium. The likely result being two, parallel global computer inter-networking systems... which is pretty much what Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted.
As background, it's important to recognize that — by almost any measure — the global internet is controlled by businesses and non-profits subject to the jurisdiction of the United States government. Within a roughly 1,000-mile strip of land stretching from San Diego to Seattle lie most major internet businesses and network control or standards bodies (and those that aren't there likely lie elsewhere in the United States). So — as the governments of China, Russia and Iran never tire of explaining — while Americans constitute around 310 million out of the world's 4.3 billion internet users (around 8%), the U.S. government exercises influence or control over more than 70% of the internet's controls and services... China's ability to control the internet experience within its bordersx` between roughly 2005 and 2018 taught many other countries that doing so, even if costly, is possible. This lesson was not lost on Russia, Iran, Australia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the EU and many other countries, which began developing legal (and sometimes technical) means to control internet content within their borders. This legal/technical nationalization over the past decade was significantly boosted by the realization that it was actually not very difficult for a government to substantially shut down the internet within a territory...
The first major step in the introduction of a new, China-centric internet may have taken place last year when China introduced to the UN's International Telecommunications Union a proposal for a new type of protocol that would connect networks in a way comparable to, but different from, the way that the internet protocols have done. This was quickly dubbed China's New IP, and it has been the subject of major controversy as the nations and companies decide how to react. Whether a new Chinese-centric internet is based on a new series of protocols or is simply based on a new set of internet domain names and numbers, it seems likely that this alternate internet will give national governments quite a bit more control over what happens within their territories than does the global, open internet. This feature will attract quite a few national governments to join in — not least Russia, Iran and perhaps Turkey and India.
The combined market power of those participating countries would make it difficult for any global internet business to avoid such a new medium. The likely result being two, parallel global computer inter-networking systems... which is pretty much what Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted.
No, that won't happen... (Score:3, Insightful)
When we can stick a pizza-box sized antenna anywhere under open sky and pull down fast Internet, how will censors firewall tthat?
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When available, of course. Right now the system is in early beta.
The Prime Directive: Leave Africa ALONE! (Score:1)
The goal of this post is to create a cohesive strategy for awakening our people and eventually generating a modern European cultural renaissance. It is less of a nuts-and-bolts solution, and is more of an over-arching philosophy and lifestyle, an ethos for white nationalists to follow which will allow solutions to occur and to move us forward towards the results that we want. These ideas aren't necessarily things that I invented. I am attempting to synthesize, f
Re: The Prime Directive: Leave Africa Agg LONE! (Score:1)
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Right. Because Internet comes from the sky and doesn't need ground stations or nodes. Jesus Christ. How stupid are people here? Reminds me the IT Crowd where they convinced Jen that the Internet was a box.
They aren't stupid you are uninformed on SpaceX and Starlink. Starlink currently has nearly 800 satellites up for internet and SpaceX is putting more up in groups of up to 60 at a time. When Starship is operational they'll be launching 400 at a time. These satellites in a LEO are providing a beta version of the Starlink internet service with low ping times and high speed. All with using a quite small (but non portable) antenna. So you have your own ground station.
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It'll be under American jurisdiction, the America that supports the *AA's, regularly declares that some countries are under economic embargo and will imprison people for practicing freedom of association and generally try to push their laws, with too much success, the world over.
While relative to China, America is much better, it has been going more and more authoritarian as well and who knows how the future will play out.
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1. The USSR used to jam foreign radio stations. I do not know how feasible it would be to jam a satellite signal.
2. The government could make owning and operating such antenna illegal, punished by 10 years in a re-education camp.
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The big problem is distinguishing between approved dishes and unapproved. All dishes for all purposes are a cropping of the exact same parabola. They are simple parabolic reflectors.
Its the same parabola they used with the first radar dishes. The same parabola they use in sporting event microphones. The same parabola as the reflector in a simple flashlight. The same parabola as the reflectors in those massive
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Um, "Internet" communication is two-way, meaning that these antennae have to *transmit*. It's not very hard to find something that's spewing microwaves at you.
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Um, "Internet" communication is two-way, meaning that these antennae have to *transmit*. It's not very hard to find something that's spewing microwaves at you.
Parabolic reflectors work both ways. Everything transmitted is going in a straight line. You have to be directly between the satellite and the dish. The whole fucking point of this very old technology seems to have gone over your head.
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Did you miss "aircraft"?
Those beams are not that damned tight. You don't have to fly all that close of a pattern to find them.
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The beams are in fact vaguely conical, although of course they don't actually have sharp edges, and do have weird lobes, because you can't make a wave propagate along a sharp cone any more than you can make it propagate in a sharp cylinder.
The -3dB beamwidth of a 15GHz Ku-band beam from a better-than-realistic 0.5m parabolic reflector is about 3 degreees. In reality, a receiver on a plane could probably detect the beam out to at least 6 degrees off center if it were strong enough to be received from a satel
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The big problem is distinguishing between approved dishes and unapproved. All dishes for all purposes are a cropping of the exact same parabola. They are simple parabolic reflectors.
Approved dishes will now be required to have a large QR code printed on them that can be automatically read by government satellites in orbit to determine if they are 'approved' or not.
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Or, you now have to have a license to have a dish antenna. The license is tied to the physical location of said antenna.
Find one at an address that does not have a license and have cops visit the address to find out what's going on.
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Act of war if the satellite is serving another country's population.
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Act of war if the satellite is serving another country's population.
Have fun, North Korea, trying to shoot down satellites faster than SpaceX can launch them.
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If the satellite is illegally broadcasting into your country you have the right to fuck with it. And it's much easier to shoot down a satellite than to launch one. No legitimate satellite Internet provider is going to illegally operate in a country without the government's permission.
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They require LOS up to the sky, finding them with an aircraft seems pretty straightforward.
A dish can be hidden under an optically opaque but transparent-to-RF material that forms part of a roof. I suppose then it could be found with FLIR; but if the stakes are high enough - and I'd say they are - somebody will come up with a way to avoid that detection mechanism too.
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They'll start shooting them down if it's not too expensive.
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how will censors firewall tthat?
We're jammin'. And we're jammin' in the name of the Lord...
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Remember we can't make anything any more, it's all made in China.
What a bunch of fucking horseshit that is. Shut the fuck up, idiot.
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Easy, you make manufacture of such antennas illegal.
Because that worked so well with weed, or even intricate compounds like fentanyl.
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Critical thinkers with ungood opinions will get censored or cancelled, and will flock to your free (as in speech) pizza-box Internet, along with the conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, Antifa, criminals and the like.
Interesting argument, but I detect a false duality. Who says there can be only one pizza-box Internet? Since we're already faced with what will effectively be a bunch of intranets replacing the Internet, the door is open for critical thinkers to have their own, leaving the criminals to theirs, etc. Then the 'underground intellectuals' won't have their cred diluted by the racists and the Alex Jones wingnuts.
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Are these critical thinkers going to launch their own satellite constellations?
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The problem is https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]. That is the real problem, corrupt governments attacking other countries to pillage those countries to feed the corrupt, not for the country.
Some extremely corrupt countries for example the UK are using those communications to subvert and actively corrupt other countries to break them down so puppet leaders can be placed in them so the countries can be ruthlessly exploited. This not so much done by those corrupt countries government but by the corrupt corpora
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When we can stick a pizza-box sized antenna anywhere under open sky and pull down fast Internet, how will censors firewall tthat?
By coming into your house and arresting you. In China, Russia and India possession of an unregistered satellite device will quickly land you in prison.
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You're confused, governments control radio spectrum. They control the land where the ground stations for the satellites are. In particular, the U.S. government will be over the ground stations for your satellite feed.
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How are you going to pay for it? If they are accepting payment the country you live in is probably going to know and be able to block it.
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By putting anyone who tries to bypass the censorship in a hellhole jail or some sort (or front of a firing squad or a gas chamber or whatever other method of capital punishment the government in question happens to like). That will deter most people from trying.
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They'll tell the satellite Internet companies to censor the Internet or don't allow them to operate in that country. Same as any other ISP. Imagine saying this: "No that won't happen when we have stick a wallet sized smart phone anywhere in my pocket and pull down fast Internet, how will censors firewall that?".
Starlink are not setting up an illegal, rogue Internet operation. They'll cooperate with whatever government they want to do business in. They can't operate in any country without being allocated spe
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It makes sense to me ... (Score:3, Interesting)
... that special interests should have their own "intranet, " that does or does not connect to the Internet.
It's the familiar LAN/WAN thingy, complete with something akin to NAT, or with complete isolation.
For instance, the US Navy should have its own intranet with bumfuzzled protocols that are the property of the US Navy, protected by laws that are similar to the ones that forbid the ownership/deployment of hand grenades.
Businesses should have another completely different protocol protected by legislation, and so on out to each separate government.
The public Internet could just stay like it is so we can all, globally, share cat videos and call people names and orchestrate Evangelical Christian white supremacy anti-LGBTQ+ antiabortion events and keep abreast of Lindsay Lohan's rehab status.
All those sequestered intranets should also have their own hardware. Right now, there is little difference in the technology in the hands of the righteous and the sinner.
CaptinDork's 14th Corrolary: "For every asshat out there with a computer, there's another asshat out there with a computer."
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I think that it's even worse - it's starting to look like it's going to be a set of ISP-controlled internets where each ISP offers different services on the web. It's just a minor nibbling today, but it looks like it's getting a little bit worse every year, all in the name of "protecting the users from dangerous stuff on the net".
Re: It makes sense to me ... (Score:2, Funny)
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Wouldn't it be interesting if ISPs went the subscriber route, much like the streaming services?
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"me too"
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Those are intranets.
Mesh Tor Nodes (Score:5, Interesting)
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It wouldn't be a bad idea, however I think that any of this will invariably devolve into a cat and mouse game with the powers that be.
For a historical context, what happened in Europe after the introduction of the printing press is essentially a repeat with what's happening now with the internet. As it became obvious that ideas could spread, and information more readily reproduced and disseminated, you started getting censorship and banning of printed material, because it could challenge the authority of th
Let's take it further... (Score:2)
Let's just rename the Internet to DirtyNet and then we can setup a much more secure national network.
I would make getting on the new secure national network akin to getting your US passport. Get your system hardware finger printed and approved. I'm sure people smarter then me could come up with a fairly strong network security coupled with legal requirements.
This network would be for banking, financial institutions, government public access sites and maybe even shopping. If everything has to go through some
Re:Let's take it further... (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't about Dirty vs. Clean. It's about re-evaluating things now that even our future DNS queries are going to be re-using HTTPS for bullshit reasons. In reality, there's no reason why confidentiality, integrity and availability preserving ideas couldn't be baked in at a lower level, as standard. That's all people are asking for. Internet services should be more reliable than the POTS that predates it, not flaky as all heck, with one tiny little mistake wrecking everything. Right now, large chunks of the Internet could be taken down by any set of bad players for any reason at any time due to an overall lack of security at its core.
Look at how everything uses Electron. Look at how everything has been built up to use the same stack. In the 90s, there was much more diversity. It's time to revisit everything and re-engineer it for the modern day.
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So, wait.
There was a bunch of perfectly working stuff. OK, maybe not FTP; FTP sucked. But a lot of stuff worked. That stuff got re-engineered to run over HTTP, usually with no improvement in functionality, culminating in the distilled idiocy of DOH. All of that was, by the way, completely contrary to the original architectural principals of the Internet, ignored HTTP's own purpose and the resulting architectural limitations, and resulted in obscene complexity getting shoved into HTTP itself in absolutely ra
So Bush was right! (Score:1)
There ARE Internets!
Irony:China is trying to help not hinder this time (Score:3, Interesting)
Here is the proposal that Huawei made, alongside the Chinese government: http://prod-upp-image-read.ft.... [ft.com]
They want international industry co-operation to move beyond the festering pile of garbage that is the existing networking stack we all ignore and take for granted. What is wrong with that?
China asked the ITU to take proposals for a replacement for TCP/IP which supports more than just IoT and industrial Internet uses. They want a replacement protocol which will allow for better support for both peer-to-peer and open networking so that devices used for basic communications are stuck in the past by being unnecessarily tethered to "the Internet" as we know it.
Their reasoning is sound. China has some of the best telecommunications infrastructure in the world with unparalleled coverage across their vast landscape. It's clear that the mindless stack of IPTCPSSLHTTP is too heavyweight for a modern world and the Chinese are stepping up to the plate to request consensus on drafting a new solution.
Having a lightweight replacement network stack where devices are uniquely and permanently tagged in order to help prevent spoofing, denial-of-service and trust related issues is not a bad thing. Every device should be identifiable and able to attest to its integrity if we're going to continue this game of adding critical things to the Internet.
Likewise, having separate, lightweight protocols will be paramount going forward to separate non-interactive communications from their interactive counterparts. You can't have 6 billion refrigerators, televisions, energy meters, cars etc. all using the same, crusty network stack. Things need to be more efficient than that. Some people talk about how China wants to change things to control people, ask yourself this, even if they didn't, would they have any problem controlling their people either way? In reality, China just wants everyone to have an equal and fair opportunity to have the same reliability guarantees they're baking in to their own infrastructure. Participating in talks helps everyone collaboratively draft standards which will bring a new level of robustness and dependability to the technology we use.
Also, they've pointed out that we're all slowly building islands by centralising everything and making everything use Internet Protocol even when it's inappropriate to do so. I agree with their stance on this.
Re:Irony:China is trying to help not hinder this t (Score:4, Insightful)
They want international industry co-operation to move beyond the festering pile of garbage that is the existing networking stack we all ignore and take for granted. What is wrong with that?
They prohibit TLS 1.3 from being using China [theregister.com] so why do you think they would change to something that didn't give them greater power? If you don't think this replacement is specifically to enable the CCP to better control the flow of information over networks then I have a bridge to sell you.
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Because they like money.
Look at 5G. Huawei has most of the juicy patents and was first to market with hardware. Obviously they want to repeat that success with other internet infrastructure.
It might have the security stuff disabled in China but they need it to sell to the rest of the world.
Re:Irony:China is trying to help not hinder this t (Score:5, Insightful)
would they have any problem controlling their people either way?
Yes. Emphatically yes. These technologies dramatically increase the fine-grained control exerted over every day life. This allows them to censor/fine/imprison before movements build momentum. Consider this very post for example: In China the government would detect me saying negative things about the party. The government would then identify my real name and address from Slashdot and ISP logs. Shortly thereafter local police would arrive to 'escort' me to a 'reeducation center'.
China just wants everyone to have an equal and fair opportunity...
China will never want that. They have not wanted that for thousands of years. Imperialism is at the very core of their culture. Xi is emperor in all but name.
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That's an excellent comment - informative, reasonable, and well thought out. I only have one reservation:
Every device should be identifiable and able to attest to its integrity if we're going to continue this game of adding critical things to the Internet.
Will this ever be possible? It seems to me that the war on spoofing and doing end-runs around integrity checks has always been and will always be a never-ending one. Somebody will always find a way around, over, or through.
Also, verification of all the hardware and software - hell, even verification of the specs themselves - is going to cost a lot. Who will pay? Governments and corporations. Who won't ha
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a lightweight replacement network stack where devices are uniquely and permanently tagged
Are you even listening to yourself or does the control freak stuff just come out on autopilot?
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Everything below the HTTP layer is pretty good. There are a couple of problems with it, but nothing fundamental.
They gave no meaningful explanation of what was wrong with it. Neither have you.
They just threw out a bunch of bald, unsupported assertions. They just bleated that existing Internet protocols weren't adequate for applications that they are manifestly just fine for.
Irony:China is trying to control this time (Score:3)
Having a lightweight replacement network stack where devices are uniquely and permanently tagged in order to help prevent spoofing, denial-of-service and trust related issues is not a bad thing.
It is if you're a dissident in said country
No, we are not (Score:2)
It's against the law. Betteridge's law to be precise.
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And anyways, it doesn't pass the laugh test; surely we'd be better off reading an article from somebody who has heard of "allies" and would understand that there would only be a few different internets even if things were "completely" divided.
What? How? (Score:2)
Second, what can I do except (as the OP & article author desire) get excited, worried, depressed -- in that order. Where's any call to action that will reverse this trend and provide a truly www that any one can actually do?
Third, why should I give a [insert your favorite expletive]?
Yeah, probably so. (Score:2)
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Goodness (Score:2)
>"while Americans constitute around 310 million out of the world's 4.3 billion internet users (around 8%), the U.S. government exercises influence or control over more than 70% of the internet's controls and services..."
And thank goodness, too. The USA "invented" the Internet and made it into a governmental, then educational, then commercial reality. Had the USA not been the inventor and steward of it, it likely would have never taken off like it did or it would have already fallen apart by now.
Those c
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They've been saying this for well over a decade.
Already optionally segmented (Score:2)
Many companies already use geolocations to filter. But this is their choice. Why does a local utility need to allow access to/from IPs in countries that don't care or even encorgage attacks on the US? No, this doesn't eliminate all attacks, but it sure trims the noise, and allows for action against the remaining IPs (contact netblock admins, get response).
Downside is that while visiting say Russia or China you can't pay your electric bill, or you can't use a Chinese or Russian-based email domain... not t
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good (Score:1)
considering that a borderless internet make all nations targets for counter-intelligence work by geopolitical adversaries, it only makes sense. borders are necessary and kumbaya, hands across the world kinda bullshit only invites disaster. what we want the world to be is different than what it actually is.
Inter-Net (Score:2)
The thing is that the Internet is defined as a network of networks. That was always the idea. The global, open, flat-structured WWW is layered on top of that.
So why yes, why not, we could be having national networks, interconnected. Google already realizes that on many searches you are mostly interested in results from your own country and lets you filter for them.
Visions of "Cyberspace" as its own world, including its own legislative rules, haven't worked out so far. It may not be the worst to have nationa
No, we're going to get rid of the borders (Score:1)
You mean from US controlled (Score:2)
Top level domains. Or taking down anything referring to DMCA in any country.
Anything new here? (Score:2)
In China, they already made Satellite TV dishes illegal, and obfuscate foreign Internet services. It wasn't 100% effective, but it didn't have to be. It just has to be inconvenient and/or expensive enough to demotivate people. So long as the alternatives are a lot easier and (arguably) better, no one cares and the people wanting to put in the effort will be minimal to the point of irrelevance (ie mostly foreigners or businesses).
Note that it is already possible to have unadulterated Internet connections ins