Tag: Internet Off-Switch

Is the Internet facing a “perfect storm”?

The Internet has become a massive part of our everyday lives. If you walk down a British high street, you can’t fail to notice people staring into their phones rather than looking where they are going! I did see a comment on TV this week that you have a 1-in-10 chance of tripping and falling over when walking along looking at your phone and messaging…

There are massive pushes for faster access in countries which already have widespread Internet adoption, both over fixed infrastructure (such as FTTC and FTTH) and wireless (LTE, aka 4G), which at times isn’t without controversy. In the UK, the incumbent, BT, is commonly (and sometimes unfairly) criticised for trying to sweat more and more out of it’s copper last mile infrastructure (the wires that go into people’s homes), while not doing enough to “future-proof” and enable remote areas by investing in fibre. There’s also been problems over the UK regulator’s decision to allow one mobile phone network get a head-start on it’s competitors in offering LTE/4G service ahead of them, using existing allocated radio frequencies (a process known as “spectrum refarming”).

Why do people care? Because the Internet helps foster growth and can reduce the costs of doing business, and it’s why the developing countries are working desperately hard to drive internet adoption, along the way having to manage the threats of “interfering” actors who either don’t fully understand or fear change.

However, a bigger threat could be facing the Internet, and it’s coming from multiple angles, technical and non-technical. A perfect storm?

  • IPv4 Resource Exhaustion
    • The existing addressing (numbering) scheme used by the Internet is running out
    • A secondary market for “spare” IPv4 resources is developing, IPv4 addresses will have a monetary value, driven by lack of IPv6 deployment
  • Slow IPv6 Adoption
  • Increasing Regulatory attention
    • On a national level, such as the French Regulator, ARCEP, wishing to collect details on all interconnects in France or involving French entities
    • On a regional level, such as ETNO pushing for regulation of interconnect through use of QoS – nicely de-constructed by my learned colleague Geoff Huston – possibly an attempt to retroactively fix a broken business model?
    • On a Global level through the ITU, who, having disregarded the Internet as “something for academics” and not relevant to public communications back in 1988, now want to update the International Telecommunication Regulations to extend these to who “controls the Internet” and how.

All of these things threaten some of the basic foundations of the Internet we have today:

  • The Internet is “open” – anyone can connect, it’s agnostic to the data which is run over it, and this allows people to innovate
  • The Internet is “transparent” – managed using a bottom-up process of policy making and protocol development which is open to all
  • The Internet is “cheap” – relatively speaking, Internet service is inexpensive

These challenges facing the Internet combine to break all of the above.

Close the system off, drive costs up, and make development and co-ordination an invite-only closed shop in which it’s expensive to participate.

Time and effort, and investing a little money (in deploying IPv6, in some regulatory efforts, and in checking your business model is still valid), are the main things which will head off this approaching storm.

Adopting IPv6 should just be a (stay in) business decision. It’s something operational and technical that a business is in control of.

But, the regulatory aspect is tougher, unless you are big enough to be able to afford your own lobbyists. Fortunately, if you live in the UK, it’s not reached “write to your MP time”, not just yet. The UK’s position remains one of “light touch” regulation, largely letting the industry self-regulate itself through market forces, and this is being advocated to the ITU. There’s also some very bright, talented and respected people trying to get the message through that it’s economically advantageous not to make the Internet a closed top-down operated system.

Nevertheless, the challenges remain very much real. We live in interesting times.

Internet Access as a right and the Egyptian Internet Shutdown

I’m not going to do any in depth analysis (I’ll leave that to my good friends at Renesys)- it’s everywhere – but unless you’ve been comatose for the last few days, you can’t have helped notice the situation in Egypt.

Being an internet geek, I’m still going to focus on the country’s decision to take itself offline – killing it’s Internet connectivity to the rest of the world.

Firstly, while it may have slowed down the ability for folks in Egypt to communicate rapidly with the rest of the world, and potentially organise demonstrations, it also seems to have managed to drive folk who might have otherwise stayed in front of their screens out onto the streets, where they can either generally protest at the Mubarak regime, or specifically protest about being isolated from something they now take for granted.

It certainly gives the Police something to do…

The “kill-switch” mechanism appears to have been pretty simplistic, and non-technical in implementation. It is highlighted from the Renesys, RIPE Labs, and other analysis that the main Egyptian ISPs seem to have been called on in turn by folks from the Mukhabarat (the Egyptian equivalent of the secret service) and instructed to shut down external connectivity – by taking down interfaces or BGP peers.

The lack of centralised technical measures required shows that it’s not necessarily difficult for any administration to do this – either using existing instruments in law, or just having enough agents and judges to churn out the court orders and pay folks a visit.

However, the other thing to consider is that some countries are now starting to treat the Internet as an essential service and almost fundamental right, like access to water and power.

I’ve just on the way from a visit to New Zealand (where I participated in the NZNOG ’11 conference). The NZ Government is currently embarking on a process of using Government subsidy – with the premise that this will get paid back over time – to bootstrap open access FTTH implementations in major urban areas in NZ, to the extent they should bring 75% of the country’s 4.5M inhabitants within easy reach of high-speed broadband.

The motivation behind such a move is that reliable high-speed internet access will be a cornerstone of economic growth, but that comes with the corollary that it becomes an expectation of the consumer, just like they expect the power or water supply not to go off unless it’s a genuine emergency (such as the flooding in Queensland, Australia).

However, it seems like the Government involvement could become a double edged sword, as they investment threatens to come with various regulatory strings attached – the change in funding, from a private, entrepreneurially-built infrastructure, means that the Government feels like it has a right to have a say. Remains to be seen how much of one yet, but there’s already dangerous talk of “mandatory peering”, and that sort of ilk.

As far as I can tell, there’s no talk of a massive comic-strip style busbar “kill switch” being built in NZ, and the NZ Government seem to appear like moderate and reasonable folk, but will the investment in UFB be brought to bear when the NZGovt want Internet providers to accede to their desires in blocking content or controlling access?

Back to the “Internet access as a right” for the closing few words: Flipping the question on it’s head, how would you feel if the Government shut the power off to your neighbourhood because they felt like it served their needs?

Finally, a touch of irony. I composed this blogpost from 37000ft over the Texas, thanks to the reliable and affordable in-flight internet access they provide on board Virgin America.

(While on board, I saw the announcement that Mubarak has appointed his Intelligence chief as Vice President. Says a lot, right?)

That’s how richly woven through our often already complex lives ready internet access has become. Think back a few years. People’s expectations are already changing.

Update – 31st Jan 2011

Vikram Kumar, Chief Exec of InternetNZ (the association that engages in technical and public policy issues on behalf of the NZ Internet community) has just blogged an article about the possibilities for a take-down of NZ’s external connectivity to the Rest of the World. Summary: probably unlikely.

Update – 2nd Feb 2011

Internet access in Egypt was restored in the last 12 hours, and there’s coverage of this on the Renesys Blog