Internet Atmosphere

The myth around inter­net cre­ation is that it was ini­tially thought as a com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­work that could with­stand an atomic bomb. While there is some truth to the fact that packet net­works were ini­tially designed with that intent, recent events such as the shut­down of the inter­net in Egypt and Lybia seem to point to the frailty of the net infrastructure.

I would like to pro­pose some basic prin­ci­ples to launch an effort to increase the resilience of the inter­net and help it grow beyond the cur­rent choke­points that have been cre­ated for it.

The Infra­struc­ture

The inter­net, in my view, is a com­bi­na­tion of low-level infra­struc­tures and pro­to­cols that allow us all to con­nect to each other. It is, above all, a set of agree­ments between all par­ties involved as to what is and isn’t accept­able across the board. Some may argue oth­er­wise (Some see the net as the phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture that con­nect us; some see the net as only the web; some see it as only com­pa­nies like Google, Face­book, etc… I don’t. I see it as all encompassing.)

The infra­struc­ture of the inter­net, how­ever, is one that is still largely held in pri­vate hands. I explored the sub­ject at greater length last year but to make a long story short, access to the inter­net can be con­trolled in 3 areas: at the source (where the servers allow­ing for cre­at­ing and shar­ing con­tent are located), at the receiv­ing end (where the com­puter or mobile device is receiv­ing con­tent) or in-between those two points (either using fire­walls or shut­ting down the infra­struc­ture altogether).

Repres­sive gov­ern­ments tend to work at all those points, often man­ag­ing to block por­tions of the net­work through a vari­ety of means. For exam­ple, China has been able to shut down sites located in China, block out sites located out­side of China (through what is often referred to as the great fire­wall of China), and has fairly tight con­trol of the tele­com indus­try (the Red Army holds sub­stan­tial share­holder stakes in any­one doing busi­ness in China, includ­ing the tel­cos), giv­ing it almost full con­trol on the end to end approach.

Activists have been mov­ing sites out­side of China and using a vari­ety of tools (most notably, Tor) to bypass the great fire­wall of China but they will be left pow­er­less if the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment decides to unplug the net­work infrastructure.

At the end of the day, that infra­struc­ture is cur­rently the weak­est point in the inter­net. The mess of wires and wire­less ser­vices that sits between your access device and this site (or any other site) is what is mak­ing the inter­net a global net­work… and it is some­thing that is largely out­side the con­trol of any­one but the rich­est and most pow­er­ful peo­ple, orga­ni­za­tions, and gov­ern­ments. In the US, for exam­ple, it is mostly under the con­trol of tele­phone and cable com­pa­nies, which them­selves are work­ing in con­junc­tion with local, state, and fed­eral regulators.

A sub­stan­tial part of the rea­son for that con­trol by large oper­a­tors is that build­ing out and main­tain­ing that infra­struc­ture has been and still is a rel­a­tively expen­sive effort. Lay­ing down and main­tain­ing the cables and equip­ment used to dis­trib­ute cap­tioned pic­tures of cats or images from the lat­est revolt is some­thing that has required invest­ments in the bil­lions, if not tril­lions of dol­lars glob­ally. In devel­oped coun­tries, that infra­struc­ture rebuilt hap­pened mostly in the 1990s, one of the great­est ben­e­fits from the dot­com explo­sions as invest­ments in the early inter­net star­tups helped sub­si­dize one of the great­est build­outs in human his­tory (in the US alone, I would con­sider the effort to be on par with the great pyramids).

How­ever, we have now learned that wires are frail and the march of tech­nol­ogy has for­tu­nately allowed us to move to some­thing that could help poten­tially move the infra­struc­ture beyond its cur­rent state to a brand new world.

From cloud to atmosphere

With web 2.0, the idea of host­ing con­tent on remote servers shared by many and admin­is­tered by few (Ama­zon, Google, etc..) has been com­monly referred to as the cloud… and that anal­ogy has been increas­ingly used to talk about the inter­net as an amor­phous group, mov­ing beyond the ground-based con­cepts of land lines and server farms to evoke some­thing greater.

At the same time, devices, whether they are mobile phones, tablets, com­put­ers, or oth­ers, have increas­ingly moved away from using cables to con­nect to the inter­net, lever­ag­ing an alpha­bet soup of acronyms like EDGE, 3G, 4G, and Wi-Fi to access the inter­net wire­lessly. For the pur­pose of fur­ther dis­cus­sion, I would like to know refer to wire­less inter­net access as the atmos­phere.

Today, that space is still under the con­trol of large enti­ties, due to a com­bi­na­tion of out­dated intel­lec­tual prop­erty con­cepts and fore­ce­ful lob­by­ing by estab­lished play­ers. How­ever, many before me have argued for open­ing up the wire­less spec­trum fur­ther. By using the atmos­phere nomen­cla­ture, I would argue that lock­ing down of the wire­less space is a form of pol­lu­tion that can be routed around.

The atmos­phere is every­thing that sur­rounds the cloud. It is the space between the devices that are used for cre­ation and con­sump­tion of content.

No one should own the atmos­phere: It sur­rounds us and we all con­tribute to its well-being and decay in an almost equal fashion.

The atmos­phere is the infra­struc­ture that makes the cloud pos­si­ble.

It is a pub­lic inter­net (or a vir­tual com­mon) where the inter­net pub­lic (or all of us) can interact.

… and the atmos­phere needs all of us to work together to ensure that a sin­gle party can­not poi­son it.

A breath of Fresh Air

Today’s inter­net atmos­phere can be seen as largely divided between con­trol in the wire­less space and con­trol in the land­line space… and where con­trol exists, the poten­tial to cut off the air sup­ply is stronger.

Mobile phones and mobile devices access­ing the inter­net over GSM, 3G, 4G, EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA and other acronym the tele­com indus­try can throw at us are gen­er­ally con­trolled by wire­less tele­phone com­pa­nies. This is why one can sel­dom take a device from one coun­try to the next with­out being forced to either switch car­rier or be faced with rel­a­tively expen­sive fees for “roaming”.

The alter­na­tive for this is usu­ally seen as WiFi, which allows any­one to set up a wire­less hotspot as long as the upstream provider (the one the WiFi hotspot is con­nected to) agrees to it. So while few cable and phone com­pa­nies have objected to WiFi hotspots being con­nected by indi­vid­u­als to date, they could eas­ily shut down access to the inter­net at those end points.

What we now need is an infra­struc­ture that would route around those end points and cre­ate a mesh net­work between dif­fer­ent hotspot that are not con­nected to each other.

Cues From Nature

The net inter­prets cen­sor­ship as dam­age and routes around it — John Gilmore

The atmos­phere is resilient and tends to self-correct. For exam­ple, if a toxic par­ti­cle shows up in the atmos­phere, other com­po­nents of the atmos­phere can deal with it. And while an area of the atmos­phere can be dam­aged at a time, all the other areas can help repair it over time.

So if there is pol­lu­tion in Bhopal India, the over­all atmos­phere even­tu­ally dis­si­pates that pol­lu­tion and the sys­tem is restored.

All this hap­pens with­out any­one pulling a trig­ger, or with­out any major cat­alytic event. It’s the work of bil­lions or tril­lions of par­ti­cles all work­ing in con­junc­tion with each other to keep things going. It’s a pat­tern that repeats itself in nature time and again.  Ants work together to repair their farms after it’s been flooded; bees work together to fend off attack by a hun­gry bear; the whole ecosys­tem works together to bal­ance out preys and preda­tors. It’s an evo­lu­tion­ary bat­tle we can all take cues from.

And it is one that the inter­net needs to take its cues from. For the inter­net to sur­vive in the long run, it needs a healthy atmos­phere… and that’s where you come in.

As nature gives us cues about col­lec­tive action to ensure the well being of all the group, even in the face of a threat against an indi­vid­ual, we must find a way to work col­lec­tively to ensure the well being of the net in future.

A global mesh

I believe that mar­kets, by their own nature, can be one of the best route around cen­sor­ship. My main rea­son for that belief is that every time a com­pany closes a door in the mar­ket­place, one of its com­peti­tors starts look­ing at keep­ing that door open as a com­pet­i­tive advantage.

So, in the wire­less space, an uneasy peace has been struck between the oper­a­tors where most of them agree to not shut down most of the inter­net, because it is in their best eco­nomic inter­est to do so.

As I’ve high­lighted ear­lier, how­ever, there are cer­tain areas where the mar­ket does not help. For exam­ple, when a bor­der is crossed, a device can lose its access to the net because the oper­a­tor is not run­ning ser­vices in that geo­graph­i­cal area and there­fore doesn’t care to estab­lish­ing any kind of peer­ing agree­ment with other com­pa­nies in that country. Another extreme end of this is the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in sev­eral mid­dle east­ern coun­tries, where dic­ta­tors can go to the few oper­a­tors of net­works in their coun­try and tell them to shut down or suf­fer the consequences.

So the only way around such issue is to dis­trib­ute the con­trol of the atmos­phere as widely as pos­si­ble: to cre­ate mil­lions or bil­lions of par­ti­cles that allow all sys­tems to breathe easily.

In other words, the way to route around any poten­tial dam­age to the atmos­phere is to cre­ate a set of pro­to­cols that will allow any device to talk to each other and agree to route traf­fic from and to each other when needed. In the next entry, I will intro­duce what I con­sider some of the basic prin­ci­ples to define such a set of pro­to­cols. I do not have all the tech­ni­cal solu­tions (but I expect that some my read­ers will be inspired to put the call to action and fig­ure out the tech­ni­cal details) but I can pro­vide a basic frame­work that peo­ple can build on.

Wrap-up

As the true embod­i­ment of Jefferson’s mar­ket­place of exchange of ideas, the Inter­net has now become a tool to increase democ­racy, improve lives, and hope­fully make earth a bet­ter place for all of us. As such, it has also become a threat to estab­lished orders, and many are fight­ing to shut por­tions of it or all of it down.

Whether it is cen­sor­ship in China, lock­out in Lybia, block­ing wik­ileaks, or denial of ser­vice attacks, the atmos­phere should be resilient enough to route around and to ensure that inter­net pub­lic still has access to the pub­lic inter­net… and it is incum­bent upon us all to fig­ure out how to ensure the inter­net atmos­phere is not pol­luted by the fumes of censorship.

A spe­cial thank you goes out to Doc Searls and Kevin Wer­bach for help­ing me tighten up this piece.