Net neutrality and the terminator threat

Crude as the Terminator movies were, both T2 and T3 deserve careful watching for the technical scenarios they offer, serious and professional (at least in part). SECURITY was absolutely crucial in the breakouts which led to the end of humanity, and it is also crucial to interactions with places like North Korea which rise to being extinction threats as well if one considers the whole chain of possible events. 

That being so... the net neutrality debate now underway (with Google, Amazon and ACLU and others planning to challenge the recent FCC ruling and even push for new legislation) really fits within our scope. Here are my thoughts this morning about that debate:

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Many people in DC think of the net neutrality debate as "Which giant stakeholder should be given all the goodies?" That way of thinking is by itself a disaster. Conservatives claim the government should not be picking winners and losers, but clearly there is a lot of hypocrisy in DC which has been hurting the US in numerous ways; however, for now, let me focus on the net neutrality issue and the future of the internet.

Net neutrality was a SYSTEM, not a specific list of winners and losers. The folks getting rid of it, step by step, argue that a "system" is basically just a mass of regulations, and all regulations should be eliminated.  Zero regulation would also be a system. Which is the best system, one of these two or something altogether different?

It turns out that physical reality is really important to policy in this sector, just as it was in the deregulation of electric power. Conservatives often quote Santayana: "Those who do not learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them." In electric power, it was learned that vertical integration, combining the generation of power and local distribution and ownership of the wires all together, led to immense monopoly power. Obviously, the combination of content generation and internet transmission altogether would lead to even more massive monopoly problems, threatening not only prices and growth and fairness but democracy and culture themselves. 

The way to minimize regulation, and create more real market competition, in electric power was to forcibly SEPARATE ownership of the wires from generation. 

But here, the physical layer of the internet is a COMBINATION of wires and wireless. 

Some people, trying to defend the recent FCC action, have argued that the wires are all going to go away anyway, so let's build a system where what goes over the wires will decay but wireless will replace them, providing a massively competitive wireless system. THIS TACIT ASSUMPTION is at the core of why they are screwing things up.

What's wrong with the assumption and where it leads us?

To begin with, what about security? It really is important not to underestimate the importance of security both in operating systems and in communications. Security has been only a mid-level problem in the past, but it's important to understand that technology is changing, massively and fast, all over the world, and that platforms which were viable in the past are rapidly moving towards being unworkable altogether. Electric power has been at the forefront of the need for stronger security, and it is really scary how NSA has abolished the Information Assurance group which worked with Red Hat to provide relatively unbreakable operating systems for crucial functions in electric power. That's one of the areas which urgently calls for new approaches, to achieve a sustainable balance, but security of communications is just as important. At the end of the day, folks who say "don't worry, all our wireless is encrypted"... either don't know about some of the recent developments or don't really care so long as neglect serves their personal interests. (Yes, Virginia, vested interests do pervert things at times in DC.)

If we decide that we DON'T want the hard wired internet system to go to hell, the lessons from electric power clearly apply. Logic suggests that net neutrality is too weak for that sector, and that wires and content generation should simply be separated 100%, with rational algorithms used to determine routing just as electricity is routed by rational algorithms (which continue to evolve).

Of course, even the wireless system is not just one big happy free competitive network for all. 

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What will new quantum technology (currently being led by China in the relevant areas) do to systems like bitcoin (or wireless) which depend so heavily on encryption? I have recently heard major miners worry about that... as well they should. There is an impressive article in PRL this past month from about 15 places in China, including Pan Jianwei as one of the authors, which in my view has huge implications for the breaking of encryption, far beyond the traditional David Deutsch digital quantum computing advertized in the West. But there is another generation coming even beyond that, hinted at very lightly in the PRL paper, related to some of the things we discussed at CASIA (one of the coauthors) a few weeks ago. No, Virginia, technology will not be the same in five years as it is now, and it is certainly not ONLY Xi Jinping making decisions in this arena. 

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All for now. Best of luck,

    Paul

P.S. I was intrigued to learn that www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf has been studied in more places than you might expect in Beijing. (That was published in a book from NATO/IOS Press.)