Tales of the internet’s imminent demise have been popping up regularly since, well, the inception of the internet. But I expect more from John Maroff, the New York Times technology reporter, who’s swallowed whole the “sky is falling” line of reasoning.
Markoff starts off framing his doomsday story with a recounting of the Morris worm that exploited known Unix vulnerabilities in an attempt to map the size of the then-nascent internet. What Markoff remarkably leaves out of his apocryphal recounting is the simple bit that each of the 6,000-some computers impacted by the worm would have weathered the storm had their administrators simply not panicked and turned the machines off. That’s right; as Markoff almost certainly knows, had the machines’ administrators just left the computers on, the problem would have resolved itself within a matter of hours.
Markoff is quick to point to a fix planned by Stanford researchers: a “‘gated community’ where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety.” Sound familiar? It’s the homeland portion of the Bush doctrine—trade liberty for security theater—all over again.
In “Fixing the Internet might break it worse than it’s broken now,” David Isenberg appropriately frames the issue: “We who use the internet every day risk losing sight of what a miracle it is, and the openness that keeps it so miraculous.” Isenberg points to the Benjamin Franklin quote that was wildly popular during the Bush administration’s encroachments into the US citizenry’s civil liberties: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Franklin wrote this as part of his notes for a proposal at the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1775, although an earlier variant appeared in Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1738.
Isenberg articulately outlines the core problem of a segmented internet—into pristine gated communities and grittier “bad” neighborhoods”—with the supposition of someone coming up with a wholly new and useful internet application not being able to convince the gatekeepers of its worthiness. “The generativity of the internet,” writes Isenberg, “could degenerate in a hurry.”
Like Isenberg, my experience of security problems in the last 25 years of network use boil down to my own stupidity or bad players (like Google’s recent Google Earth update) in the application layer. Also like Isenberg, when I see stories like Markoff’s I want to know, “Who wants the story of the dangerous internet spread? Who wants the internet to be seen as a dangerous place? Whose business models are becoming obsolete as the generic generative internet grows and pervades? Who is threatened by the absence of gatekeepers?”
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.