Computed·Blg

Via The Register

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Google is attempting to shunt users away from old browsers by intentionally serving up a stale version of the ad giant's search homepage to those holdouts.

The tactic appears to be falling in line with Mountain View's policy on its other Google properties, such as Gmail, which the company declines to fully support on aged browsers.

However, it was claimed on Friday in a Google discussion thread that the multinational had unceremoniously dumped a past its sell-by-date version of the Larry Page-run firm's search homepage on those users who have declined to upgrade their Opera and Safari browsers.

A user with the moniker DJSigma wrote on the forum:

A few minutes ago, Google's homepage reverted to the old version for me. I'm using Opera 12.17. If I search for something, the results are shown with the current Google look, but the homepage itself is the old look with the black bar across the top. It seems to affect only the Google homepage and image search. If I click on "News", for instance, it's fine.

I've tried clearing cookies and deleting the browser cache/persistent storage. I've tried disabling all extensions. I've tried masking the browser as IE and Firefox. It doesn't matter whether I'm signed in or signed out. Nothing works. Please fix this!

In a later post, DJSigma added that there seemed to be a glitch on Google search.

If I go to the Google homepage, I get served the old version of the site. If I search for something, the results show up in the current look. However, if I then try and type something into the search box again, Google search doesn't work at all. I have to go back to the homepage every time to do a new search.

The Opera user then said that the problem appeared to be "intermittent". Others flagged up similar issues on the Google forum and said they hoped it was just a bug.

While someone going by the name MadFranko008 added:

Phew ... thought it was just me and I'd been hacked or something ... Same problem here everything "Google" has reverted back to the old style of several years ago.

Tested on 3 different computers and different OS's & browsers ... All have the same result, everything google has gone back to the old style of several years ago and there's no way to change it ... Even the copyright has reverted back to 2013!!!

Some Safari 5.1.x and Opera 12.x netizens were able to fudge the system by customising their browser's user agent. But others continued to complain about Google's "clunky", old search homepage.

A Google employee, meanwhile, said that the tactic was deliberate in a move to flush out stick-in-the-mud types who insisted on using older versions of browsers.

"Thanks for the reports. I want to assure you this isn't a bug, it's working as intended," said a Google worker going by the name nealem. She added:

We’re continually making improvements to Search, so we can only provide limited support for some outdated browsers. We encourage everyone to make the free upgrade to modern browsers - they’re more secure and provide a better web experience overall.

In a separate thread, as spotted by a Reg reader who brought this sorry affair to our attention, user MadFranko008 was able to show that even modern browsers - including the current version of Chrome - were apparently spitting out glitches on Apple Mac computers.

Google then appeared to have resolved the search "bug" spotted in Chrome.

Via Wired

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Illustration: dzima1/Getty

When Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette said the tech giant might bring 10 gigabits per second internet connections to American homes, it seemed like science fiction. That’s about 1,000 times faster than today’s home connections. But for NASA, it’s downright slow.

While the rest of us send data across the public internet, the space agency uses a shadow network called ESnet, short for Energy Science Network, a set of private pipes that has demonstrated cross-country data transfers of 91 gigabits per second–the fastest of its type ever reported.

NASA isn’t going bring these speeds to homes, but it is using this super-fast networking technology to explore the next wave of computing applications. ESnet, which is run by the U.S. Department of Energy, is an important tool for researchers who deal in massive amounts of data generated by projects such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Human Genome Project. Rather sending hard disks back and forth through the mail, they can trade data via the ultra-fast network. “Our vision for the world is that scientific discovery shouldn’t be constrained by geography,” says ESnet director Gregory Bell.

In making its network as fast as it can possibly be, ESnet and researchers are organizations like NASA are field testing networking technologies that may eventually find their way into the commercial internet. In short, ESnet a window into what our computing world will eventually look like.

The Other Net

The first nationwide computer research network was the Defense Department’s ARPAnet, which evolved into the modern internet. But it wasn’t the last network of its kind. In 1976, the Department of Energy sponsored the creation of the Magnetic Fusion Energy Network to connect what is today the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center with other research laboratories. Then the agency created a second network in 1980 called the High Energy Physics Network to connect particle physics researchers at national labs. As networking became more important, agency chiefs realized it didn’t make sense to maintain multiple networks and merged the two into one: ESnet.

The nature of the network changes with the times. In the early days it ran on land lines and satellite links. Today it is uses fiber optic lines, spanning the DOE’s 17 national laboratories and many other sites, such as university research labs. Since 2010, ESnet and Internet2—a non-profit international network built in 1995 for researchers after the internet was commercialized—have been leasing “dark fiber,” the excess network capacity built-up by commercial internet providers during the late 1990s internet bubble.

An Internet Fast Lane

In November, using this network, NASA’s High End Computer Networking team achieved its 91 gigabit transfer between Denver and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. It was the fastest end-to-end data transfer ever conducted under “real world” conditions.

ESnet has long been capable of 100 gigabit transfers, at least in theory. Network equipment companies have been offering 100 gigabit switches since 2010. But in practice, long-distance transfers were much slower. That’s because data doesn’t travel through the internet in a straight line. It’s less like a super highway and more like an interstate highway system. If you wanted to drive from San Francisco to New York, you’d pass through multiple cities along the way as you transferred between different stretches of highway. Likewise, to send a file from San Francisco to New York on the internet—or over ESnet—the data will flow through hardware housed in cities across the country.

A map of ESnet’s connected sites. Image: Courtesy of ESnet

NASA did a 98 gigabit transfer between Goddard and the University of Utah over ESnet in 2012. And Alcatel-Lucent and BT obliterated that record earlier this year with a 1.4 terabit connection between London and Ipswich. But in both cases, the two locations had a direct connection, something you rarely see in real world connections.

On the internet and ESnet, every stop along the way creates the potential for a bottleneck, and every piece of gear must be ready to handle full 100 gigabit speeds. In November, the team finally made it work. “This demonstration was about using commercial, off-the-shelf technology and being able to sustain the transfer of a large data network,” says Tony Celeste, a sales director at Brocade, the company that manufactured the equipment used in the record-breaking test.

Experiments for the Future

Meanwhile, the network is advancing the state of the art in other ways. Researchers have used it to explore virtual network circuits called “OSCARS,” which can be used to create complex networks without complex hardware changes. And they’re working on what are known as network “DMZs,” which can achieve unusually fast speeds by handling security without traditional network firewalls.

These solutions are designed specifically for networks in which a small number of very large transfers take place–as opposed to the commercial internet where lots of small transfers take place. But there’s still plenty for commercial internet companies to learn from ESnet. Telecommunications company XO Communications already has a 100 gigabit backbone, and we can expect more companies to follow suit.

Although we won’t see 10-gigabit connections—let alone 100 gigabit connections—at home any time soon, higher capacity internet backbones will mean less congestion as more and more people stream high-definition video and download ever-larger files. And ESnet isn’t stopping there. Bell says the organization is already working on a 400 gigabit network, and the long-term goal is a terabyte per second network, which about 100,000 times faster than today’s home connections. Now that sounds like science fiction.

Update 13:40 EST 06/17/14: This story has been updated to make it clear that ESnet is run by the Department of Energy.

Update 4:40 PM EST 06/17/14: This story has been updated to avoid confusion between ESnet’s production network and its more experimental test bed network.

Via TechCrunch

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Not very often do you read something online that gives you the chills. Today, I read two such things.

The first came from former Gizmodo, Buzzfeed and now Awl writer John Herrman, who wrote about the brutality of the mobile social (or for sake of discussion ‘fourth’) Internet:

“Metafilter came from two or three internets ago, when a website’s core audience—people showing up there every day or every week, directly—was its main source of visitors. Google might bless a site with new visitors or take them away.

Either way, it was still possible for a site’s fundamentals to be strong, independent of extremely large outside referrers. What’s so disconcerting now is that the new sources of readership, the apps and sites people check every day and which lead people to new posts and stories, make up a majority of readership, and they’re utterly unpredictable (they’re also bigger, always bigger, every new internet is.)”

This broke my heart. In 2008, two Internets ago, Metafilter was my favorite site. It was where I went to find out what the next Star Wars Kid would be, or to find precious baby animal videos to show my cool boyfriend or even more intellectual fare. And now it’s as endangered as the sneezing pandas I first discovered there.

National Internet treasures like Metafilter (or TechCrunch for that matter) should never die. There should be some Internet Preservation Society filled with individuals like Herrman or Marc Andreessen or Mark Zuckerberg or Andy Baio whose sole purpose is to keep them alive.

But there isn’t. Herrman makes a very good point; Useful places to find information, that aren’t some strange Pavlovian manipulation of the human desire to click or identify, just aren’t good business these days.

And Herrman should know, he’s worked in every new media outlet under the web, including the one that AP staffers are now so desperate to join that they make mistakes like this.

The fourth Internet is scary like Darwinism, brutal enough to remind me of high school. It’s a game of identity where you either make people feel like members of some exclusive club, like The Information does with a pricy subscription model or all niche tech sites do with their relatively high CPM, or you straight up play up to reader narcissism like Buzzfeed does, slicing and dicing user identity until you end up with “21 Problems Only People With Baby Faces Will Understand.”

Which brings me to the thing I read today which truly scared the shit out of me. Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti, though his LinkedIn is completely bereft of it in favor of MIT, was apparently an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz in the late 90s.

Right after graduation in 1996, he wrote a paper about identity and capitalism in post-modern times, which tl:dr postulated that neo-capitalism needs to get someone to identify with its ideals before it could sell its wares.

(Aside: If you think you are immune to capitalistic entreaties, because you read Adbusters and are a Culture Jammer, you’re not. Think of it this way: What is actually wrong with being chubby? But how hard do modern ads try to tell you that this — which is arguably the Western norm — is somehow not okay.)

The thesis Peretti put forth in his paper is basically the blueprint for Buzzfeed, which increasingly has made itself All About You. Whether you’re an Armenian immigrant, or an Iggy Azaelia fan or a person born in the 2000s, 1990s or 80s, you will identify with Buzzfeed, because its business model (and the entire fourth Internet’s ) depends on it.

As Dylan Matthews writes:

“The way this identification will happen is through images and video, through ‘visual culture.’ Presumably, in this late capitalist world, someone who creates a website that can use pictures and GIFs and videos to form hundreds if not thousands of new identities for people to latch onto will become very successful!”

More than anything else in the pantheon of modern writing or as the kids call it, content creation, Buzzfeed aims to be hyper-relatable, through visuals! It hopes it can define your exact identity, because only then will you share its URL on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr as some sort of badge of your own uniqueness, immortality.

If the first Internet was “Getting information online,” the second was “Getting the information organized” and the third was “Getting everyone connected” the fourth is definitely “Get mine.” Which is a trap.

Which Cog In The Digital Capitalist Machine Are You?

Via TechCrunch

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There is no point in kidding ourselves, now, about Who Has the Power.
– Hunter S. Thompson, jacket copy, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The Internet wasn’t supposed to be so…Machiavellian.

In 1963, Stewart Brand and his wife set out on a landmark road trip, the goal of which was to educate and enliven the people they encountered with tools for modern living. The word “tools” was taken liberally. Brand wrote that “a realm of intimate, personal power is developing.” Any tool that created or channeled such power was useful. Tools meant books, maps, professional journals, courses, classes, and more.

In 1968, Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), an underground magazine of sorts that would scale in a way no road-weary Dodge ever could. The first issue was 64 pages and cost $5. It opened with the phrase: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

A year after WEC’s start, on October 29, 1969, the first packet of data was sent from UCLA to SRI International. It was called ARPAnet at the time, but with it the Internet was born. Brand and others would come to see the Internet as the essential, defining “tool” of their generation. Until its final issue in 1994, the WEC’s 32 editions provide as good a chronicle of the emergence of cyberculture (as it was then called) as you can find.

Cyberculture. It’s a curious and complicated term in today’s society, isn’t it? Cyberculture is at once completely outdated and awfully relevant.

As Fred Turner has argued, Brand is a key figure in the weaving together of two major cultural fabrics that have since split — counterculture and cyberculture. Brand is also immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test  as a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. And Brand famously assisted researcher Doug Engelbart with the “Mother of all Demos,” the outline of a vision for technology prosthetics that improve human life; it would define computing for decades to come.

The Merry Pranksters, still from the movie Magic Trip

Brand attended Phillips Exeter Academy — an elite East Coast high school, and an institution of traditional power if there ever was one. He was a parachutist in the U.S. Army. He graduated with a degree in biology from Stanford, studied design at San Francisco Art Institute and photography at San Francisco State. He also participated in legal studies of LSD and its effects with Timothy Leary.

That’s hardly the typical resume of a technologist or an entrepreneur or an investor. But it should be. The business of making culture has been for too long now controlled by people who live outside it.

It is my opinion that the Internet of today can and must be countercultural again, that cyberculture should — needs to be — countercultural.

That word, countercultural, carries with it the connotation of liberal idealism and societal marginalia. Yet, the new countercultures we’re seeing online today are profoundly mainstream, and drawn along wholly different political lines. The Internet is its own party. The Internet has its own set of beliefs. Springs have sprung the world over and this isn’t simply a nerd thing anymore. We all care passionately about Internet life and Internet liberty and the continual pursuit of happiness both online and off.

Yet if the Internet is a measure of our culture, our zeitgeist, then what does it tell us about the spirit of this age? Our zeitgeist certainly isn’t what’s trending; it’s not another quiz of which TV character you are; it’s not another listicle. I changed the global power structure and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. And Facebook. And Twitter.

What is this generation’s Rolling Stone? What is our Whole Earth Catalog? It’s an important question because if the Internet is defining our culture, and our use of it defines our society, then we have a responsibility to ensure and propel its transformative impact, to understand the ways cyberculture can and should be the counterculture driving change rather than just distracting us from it.

There are beacons of hope. I eagerly await Jon Evans’ fantastic column in these pages each weekend for reasons like this.

The Daily Dot, a publication I co-founded, documents today’s cyberculture through the lens of online communities — virtual locales in which we arguably “reside” more deliberately than any geography. You should also be reading Edge, N+1, and Dangerous Minds. Even Vanity Fair has turned its eye to this theme, successfully I think, with articles like this. Rolling Stone is doing a pretty good job of being Rolling Stone these days, too.

I’m terminally optimistic, and I believe that counter-cyber-culture is inherently optimistic, as well. Even despite the U.S. government’s overreaching on privacy and “protecting” us from data about our own bodies, despite Silicon Valley’s mad rush to cash in on apps rather than substantial technology, despite most online media’s drastic descent to the lowest common denominator and even lower standards of journalism, I remain…optimistic.

We have found a courage in our growing numbers online. People old and young can be be bold and defining on the Internet, underwritten by the emotional support of peers everywhere. We’re voting for what we want the world to be, and how we want it to be. Why do you think Kickstarter works so well? We fund things that without our help are unlikely to exist, but ought to nonetheless. Our “likes” and “shares” are ultimately becoming votes for the kind of future we want to live in, and I’m optimistic that we will ultimately wield that responsibility with meaning and thoughtfully.

Tumblr. 4chan. Etsy. YouTube. We have emigrated to these outlying territories seeking religious freedoms, cultural freedoms, and personal freedoms alike. We colonized, and are still colonizing, new environs each day and every week. We claim and reclaim the Internet like so many tribal boundaries.

We’re winning more often than not, thank goodness. Aaron Swartz heroically beat SOPA and PIPA against all odds. Yahoo won against PRISM. The Internet won against cancer…with pizza. My godmother knows what Tor is.

The virtual reality community rebelled when princely Oculus sold to Facebook, for the reason that VR is a new superpower and a new countercultural medium that we’re afraid might have fallen into the wrong hands (I don’t believe that’s actually the case, but that’s grounds for another post altogether).

So, yes. A countercultural moment all our own stares us in the face. Like Brand, I hope we can manage to be politically aware and socially responsible in a way that technology begs us to be, without giving ground to the idea that the Internet is anything but ours.

Civil disobedience is a different game when the means of production and dissemination have been fully democratized. We seek differentiated high ground from which to defend our values. We build new back channels to communicate unencumbered. Instead of making catalogues, we make new categories. We wield technology, perhaps unaware on whose shoulders we stand, but at the same time free from the anxiety of influence.

We aspire to be more pure in that sense. We want and we give and we need and we will have…pure Internet.

Editor’s note: Josh Jones-Dilworth is a co-founder of the Daily Dot; founder and CEO of Jones-Dilworth, Inc., an early-stage technology marketing consultancy; and co-founder of Totem, a startup changing PR for the better. Follow his blog here. 

Featured image by Kundra/Shutterstock; Hunter S. Thompson image by Wikimedia Commons user MDCarchives (own work) under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 license

Via The Verge

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(twitter.com/mattwi1s0n / Flickr)

The internet will have nearly 3 billion users, about 40 percent of the world's population, by the end of 2014, according to a new report from the United Nations International Telecommunications Union. Two-thirds of those users will be in developing countries.

Those numbers refer to people who have used the internet in the last three months, not just those who have access to it.

Internet penetration is reaching saturation in developed countries, while it's growing rapidly in developing countries. Three out of four people in Europe will be using the internet by the end of the year, compared to two out of three in the Americas and one in three in Asia and the Pacific. In Africa, nearly one in five people will be online by the end of the year.

Mobile phone subscriptions will reach almost 7 billion. That growth rate is slowing, suggesting that the number will plateau soon. Mobile internet subscriptions are still growing rapidly, however, and are expected to reach 2.3 billion by the end of 2014.

These numbers make it easy to imagine a future in which every human on Earth is using the internet. The number of people online will still be dwarfed by the number of things, however. Cisco estimates the internet already has 10 billion connected devices and is expected to hit 50 billion by 2020.

Via The Guardian, Via Samantha Besson

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NSA spying, as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, may cause countries to create separate networks and break up the experts, according to experts. Photograph: Alex Milan Tracy/NurPhoto/NurPhoto/Corbis

The vast scale of online surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden is leading to the breakup of the internet as countries scramble to protect private or commercially sensitive emails and phone records from UK and US security services, according to experts and academics.

They say moves by countries, such as Brazil and Germany, to encourage regional online traffic to be routed locally rather than through the US are likely to be the first steps in a fundamental shift in the way the internet works. The change could potentially hinder economic growth.

"States may have few other options than to follow in Brazil's path," said Ian Brown, from the Oxford Internet Institute. "This would be expensive, and likely to reduce the rapid rate of innovation that has driven the development of the internet to date … But if states cannot trust that their citizens' personal data – as well as sensitive commercial and government information – will not otherwise be swept up in giant surveillance operations, this may be a price they are willing to pay."

Since the Guardian's revelations about the scale of state surveillance, Brazil's government has published ambitious plans to promote Brazilian networking technology, encourage regional internet traffic to be routed locally, and is moving to set up a secure national email service.

In India, it has been reported that government employees are being advised not to use Gmail and last month, Indian diplomatic staff in London were told to use typewriters rather than computers when writing up sensitive documents.

In Germany, privacy commissioners have called for a review of whether Europe's internet traffic can be kept within the EU – and by implication out of the reach of British and US spies.

Surveillance dominated last week's Internet Governance Forum 2013, held in Bali. The forum is a UN body that brings together more than 1,000 representatives of governments and leading experts from 111 countries to discuss the "sustainability, robustness, security, stability and development of the internet".

Debates on child protection, education and infrastructure were overshadowed by widespread concerns from delegates who said the public's trust in the internet was being undermined by reports of US and British government surveillance.

Lynn St Amour, the Internet Society's chief executive, condemned government surveillance as "interfering with the privacy of citizens".

Johan Hallenborg, Sweden's foreign ministry representative, proposed that countries introduce a new constitutional framework to protect digital privacy, human rights and to reinforce the rule of law.

Meanwhile, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – which is partly responsible for the infrastructure of the internet – last week voiced "strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance".

Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation in Washington, said the Snowden revelations were pushing the internet towards a tipping point with huge ramifications for the way online communications worked.

"We are certainly getting pushed towards this cliff and it is a cliff we do not want to go over because if we go over it, I don't see how we stop. It is like a run on the bank – the system we have now works unless everyone decides it doesn't work then the whole thing collapses."

Castro said that as the scale of the UK and US surveillance operations became apparent, countries around the globe were considering laws that would attempt to keep data in-country, threatening the cloud system – where data stored by US internet firms is accessible from anywhere in the world.

He said this would have huge implications for the way large companies operated.

"What this would mean is that any multinational company suddenly has lots of extra costs. The benefits of cloud computing that have given us flexibility, scaleability and reduced costs – especially for large amounts of data – would suddenly disappear."

Large internet-based firms, such as Facebook and Yahoo, have already raised concerns about the impact of the NSA revelations on their ability to operate around the world. "The government response was, 'Oh don't worry, we're not spying on any Americans'," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. "Oh, wonderful: that's really helpful to companies trying to serve people around the world, and that's really going to inspire confidence in American internet companies."

Castro wrote a report for Itif in August predicting as much as $35bn could be lost from the US cloud computing market by 2016 if foreign clients pull out their businesses. And he said the full economic impact of the potential breakup of the internet was only just beginning to be recognised by the global business community.

"This is changing how companies are thinking about data. It used to be that the US government was the leader in helping make the world more secure but the trust in that leadership has certainly taken a hit … This is hugely problematic for the general trust in the internet and e-commerce and digital transactions."

Brown said that although a localised internet would be unlikely to prevent people in one country accessing information in another area, it may not be as quick and would probably trigger an automatic message telling the user that they were entering a section of the internet that was subject to surveillance by US or UK intelligence.

"They might see warnings when information is about to be sent to servers vulnerable to the exercise of US legal powers – as some of the Made in Germany email services that have sprung up over the summer are."

He said despite the impact on communications and economic development, a localised internet might be the only way to protect privacy even if, as some argue, a set of new international privacy laws could be agreed.

"How could such rules be verified and enforced? Unlike nuclear tests, internet surveillance cannot be detected halfway around the world."

Via Internet Census 2012

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Abstract While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage.

All data gathered during our research is released into the public domain for further study. 

The full study

Via Slash Gear

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Google will be conducting a 45-day public trial with the FCC to create a centralized database containing information on free spectrum. The Google Spectrum Database will analyze TV white spaces, which are unused spectrum between TV stations, that can open many doors for possible wireless spectrum expansion in the future. By unlocking these white spaces, wireless providers will be able to provide more coverage in places that need it.

The public trial brings Google one step closer to becoming a certified database administrator for white spaces. Currently the only database administrators are Spectrum Bridge, Inc. and Telcordia Technologies, Inc. Many other companies are applying to be certified, including a big dog like Microsoft. With companies like Google and Microsoft becoming certified, discovery of white spaces should increase monumentally.

Google’s trial allows all industry stakeholders, including broadcasters, cable, wireless microphone users, and licensed spectrum holders, to provide feedback to the Google Spectrum Database. It also allows anyone to track how much TV white space is available in their given area. This entire process is known as dynamic spectrum sharing.

Google’s trial, as well as the collective help of all the other spectrum data administrators, will help unlock more wireless spectrum. It’s a necessity as there is an increasing number of people who are wirelessly connecting to the internet via smartphones, laptops, tablets, and other wireless devices. This trial will open new doors to more wireless coverage (especially in dead zones), Wi-Fi hotspots, and other “wireless technologies”.

Via NewScientist

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The ethos of freedom from control that underpins the web is facing its first serious test, says Wendy M. Grossman

WHO runs the internet? For the past 30 years, pretty much no one. Some governments might call this a bug, but to the engineers who designed the protocols, standards, naming and numbering systems of the internet, it's a feature.

The goal was to build a network that could withstand damage and would enable the sharing of information. In that, they clearly succeeded - hence the oft-repeated line from John Gilmore, founder of digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation: "The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." These pioneers also created a robust platform on which a guy in a dorm room could build a business that serves a billion people.

But perhaps not for much longer. This week, 2000 people have gathered for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates to discuss, in part, whether they should be in charge.

The stated goal of the Dubai meeting is to update the obscure International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), last revised in 1988. These relate to the way international telecom providers operate. In charge of this process is the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency set up in 1865 with the advent of the telegraph. Its $200 million annual budget is mainly funded by membership fees from 193 countries and about 700 companies. Civil society groups are only represented if their governments choose to include them in their delegations. Some do, some don't. This is part of the controversy: the WCIT is effectively a closed shop.

Vinton Cerf, Google's chief internet evangelist and co-inventor of the TCP/IP internet protocols, wrote in May that decisions in Dubai "have the potential to put government handcuffs on the net".

The need to update the ITRs isn't surprising. Consider what has happened since 1988: the internet, Wi-Fi, broadband, successive generations of mobile telephony, international data centres, cloud computing. In 1988, there were a handful of telephone companies - now there are thousands of relevant providers.

Controversy surrounding the WCIT gathering has been building for months. In May, 30 digital and human rights organisations from all over the world wrote to the ITU with three demands: first, that it publicly release all preparatory documents and proposals; second, that it open the process to civil society; and third that it ask member states to solicit input from all interested groups at national level. In June, two academics at George Mason University in Virginia - Jerry Brito and Eli Dourado - set up the WCITLeaks site, soliciting copies of the WCIT documents and posting those they received. There were still gaps in late November when .nxt, a consultancy firm and ITU member, broke ranks and posted the lot on its own site.

The issue entered the mainstream when Greenpeace and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) launched the Stop the Net Grab campaign, demanding that the WCIT be opened up to outsiders. At the launch of the campaign on 12 November, Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the ITUC, pledged to fight for as long it took to ensure an open debate on whether regulation was necessary. "We will stay the distance," she said.

This marks the first time that such large, experienced, international campaigners, whose primary work has nothing to do with the internet, have sought to protect its freedoms. This shows how fundamental a technology the internet has become.

A week later, the European parliament passed a resolution stating that the ITU was "not the appropriate body to assert regulatory authority over either internet governance or internet traffic flows", opposing any efforts to extend the ITU's scope and insisting that its human rights principles took precedence. The US has always argued against regulation.

Efforts by ITU secretary general Hamadoun Touré to spread calm have largely failed. In October, he argued that extending the internet to the two-thirds of the world currently without access required the UN's leadership. Elsewhere, he has repeatedly claimed that the more radical proposals on the table in Dubai would not be passed because they would require consensus.

These proposals raise two key fears for digital rights campaigners. The first concerns censorship and surveillance: some nations, such as Russia, favour regulation as a way to control or monitor content transiting their networks.

The second is financial. Traditional international calls attract settlement fees, which are paid by the operator in the originating country to the operator in the terminating country for completing the call. On the internet, everyone simply pays for their part of the network, and ISPs do not charge to carry each other's traffic. These arrangements underpin network neutrality, the principle that all packets are delivered equally on a "best efforts" basis. Regulation to bring in settlement costs would end today's free-for-all, in which anyone may set up a site without permission. Small wonder that Google is one of the most vocal anti-WCIT campaigners.

How worried should we be? Well, the ITU cannot enforce its decisions, but, as was pointed out at the Stop the Net Grab launch, the system is so thoroughly interconnected that there is plenty of scope for damage if a few countries decide to adopt any new regulatory measures.

This is why so many people want to be represented in a dull, lengthy process run by an organisation that may be outdated to revise regulations that can be safely ignored. If you're not in the room you can't stop the bad stuff.

Wendy M. Grossman is a science writer and the author of net.wars (NYU Press)

Via Vanity Fair

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When the Internet was created, decades ago, one thing was inevitable: the war today over how (or whether) to control it, and who should have that power. Battle lines have been drawn between repressive regimes and Western democracies, corporations and customers, hackers and law enforcement. Looking toward a year-end negotiation in Dubai, where 193 nations will gather to revise a U.N. treaty concerning the Internet, Michael Joseph Gross lays out the stakes in a conflict that could split the virtual world as we know it.

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