Governments are going to have a hard time trying to control the cyber space.
According to the Economist,
GOVERNMENTS are increasingly finding ways to enforce their laws in the digital realm. The most prominent is China’s “great firewall”. But China is by no means the only country erecting borders in cyberspace. The OpenNet Initiative, an advocacy group, lists more than a dozen countries that block internet content for political, social and security reasons. They do not need especially clever technology: governments go increasingly after dominant online firms because they are easy to get hold of. In April Google published the numbers of requests it had received from official agencies to remove content or provide information about users.
Based on his recent article, security expert Bruce Schneier would say that web regulation is a folly.
That’s because of three things:
1. It would mean a massive war against deepening spontaneous order, division of labor and diversity.
Internet is the largest communications system mankind has ever created, and it works because it is distributed. There is no central authority. No nation is in charge. Plugging all the holes isn't possible.
2. To engage in cyberspace control means censorship. It’s also a war waged against the spread of knowledge with stark ramifications.
The second flawed assumption is that we can predict the effects of such a shutdown. The Internet is the most complex machine mankind has ever built
3. The complexities of the cyberspace extrapolates to manifold loopholes and action-reaction dynamics.
The third flawed assumption is that we could build this capability securely. We can't. Once we engineered a selective shutdown switch into the Internet, and implemented a way to do what Internet engineers have spent decades making sure never happens, we would have created an enormous security vulnerability. We would make the job of any would-be terrorist intent on bringing down the Internet much easier.
Mr. Schneier concludes,
Computer and network security is hard, and every Internet system we've ever created has security vulnerabilities. It would be folly to think this one wouldn't as well. And given how unlikely the risk is, any actual shutdown would be far more likely to be a result of an unfortunate error or a malicious hacker than of a presidential order. But the main problem with an Internet kill switch is that it's too coarse a hammer. Yes, the bad guys use the Internet to communicate, and they can use it to attack us. But the good guys use it, too, and the good guys far outnumber the bad guys. Shutting the Internet down, either the whole thing or just a part of it, even in the face of a foreign military attack would do far more damage than it could possibly prevent. And it would hurt others whom we don't want to hurt.
At the end of the day, one of the two forces (free markets versus socialism) would have to yield. Guess who?
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