Protecting the internet: from cables to humans

What is the internet? You could say it’s just a collection of wires, routers, switches, copper stands, fibreoptic cables, radios and satellites. A network of networks that funnels ones and noughts around the globe. Cold and functional.

‘I look at it differently. It’s a lot more than the sum of its parts,’ says Dr Melanie Garson, the Cyber Policy Lead at the Tony Blair Institute. ‘I look at it as an ecosystem. It includes the human aspect as much as the technology. The way it lets us connect and the speed of those interconnections… the internet gives us a whole new phase of opportunity. Its democratising accessing to information and services in ways that have never been available before. These are life changing benefits.’

Dr Garson is quick however to point out that the internet has a dark side too – it’s not all rainbows and pictures of cats. And that dark side is, in a way, what we’re here to talk about. That, positive actions and ways forward.

The good, the bad and the connected

Giving a summary of her career thus far, she says: ‘I’m a practical academic. I focus on cyber policy writ large. I’ve a particular interest in tech, foreign policy and geopolitics. I’m also an Associate Professor at University College London where I teach. I have a course called From Cyber Warfare to Robots – the future of conflict in the digital age. My career’s been a long winding road, I’m also a qualified lawyer. But, what I noticed in my years of teaching international security and conflict resolution was how tech and the internet was reshaping all our natural processes.’

She says: ‘What I’m really interested in is “does tech cause the revolution or does the revolution cause the tech?’”

Returning to the course’s genesis, she explains, the idea began to crystalise in the early 2010s – when Amazon was starting to build a head of steam. The key point, she says, is tech’s capacity as an engine of grand-scale change was, at that time, just a line in her Powerpoints and lectures.

‘It was a line, that line became a slide and eventually, that slide became a lecture,’ she reflects. ‘Technology was altering everything we were doing, from new forms of access to new forms of speech. So, my international security course had at least one section on tech – drones, AI... What does soldier two point zero look like? Eventually I lobbied to teach a full ten-week course on this.’

Through the Tony Blair Institute for Change, she has recently co-authored and published a report called: The Open Internet on The Brink: Hidden Frontiers. The report is aimed at global policy makers and it takes an almost geological core-sample down through the internet’s many layers. It explores challenges to silicon chips supplies, threats to deep sea cables, explores protocols, assesses standards and analyses how global geopolitics might push and pull at the internet’s complete technology stack.

Finding solutions to a global challenge

Eye-opening and arresting, the report isn’t however bleak. The central tenet seems to be: the internet we enjoy in the western world might be flawed. What we have can be improved and, above all, it must be protected. As we shall see, Dr Garson also offers solutions and one of those has its feet firmly in unlikely soil: Monty Python.

‘What would a purely dystopian internet be like?’ Dr Garson asks. ‘It would be a highly controlled, a highly surveilled internet. And that exists in some countries. It’s an internet where you can’t trust the information you’re seeing – it’s a world of double bluff and deep fakes. It’s a world where there’s a real mistrust between humans and in humanity.’

But, potentially, this dystopia has another side too: an internet where people believe everything they read and see and have no means or motivation to sense check – an internet of echo chambers.

‘That’s the mind bending thing,’ Dr Garson says. ‘If the only access you have to information is the information that’s fed to you, censored and approved... You believe it because that’s the only information available.’

Fissures, flaws and tipping points

Turning to the report, it takes a much deeper gaze into the fissures that are opening up across the internet. Specifically, it says: ‘The global, open internet is under threat. Restrictions on internet freedoms are increasing globally, governments are competing to assert their authority and a decades-long governance system of voluntary, technical bodies is now creaking. China is a growing competitor and adversary in many areas of internet governance, yet remains an important partner in others, such as global infrastructure rollout.’

It outlines three tipping points which need to be addressed. Firstly, geopolitical competition. Here, on hidden frontiers, conflict is taking place around the internet’s architecture. Standards, supply chains and data cables are becoming fragmented. Elsewhere, 3.7 billion people across the globe are yet to gain internet access, but as they do the world cannot rely on US hegemony to protect the future of the internet. And finally, the report explains, ‘restrictive internet models are threating the internet’s health’. These include censorship, internet shutdowns and political control of the internet’s underlying architecture. These are gaining ground and at a cost to the whole world.

At the report’s heart, there seem to be three key words: Openness, permissionless and resilient. A healthy internet is all of these. A damaged one lacks one or more of these facets.

To explore the idea of openness, Dr Garson says a close internet – the opposite position – would be where whole countries are closed off.

‘It’s when we get bubbles. It’s when countries are cut off or it can be internet shutdowns – when you get that level of control,’ she explains. ‘It’s where the information doesn’t flow freely and where people – individuals – cannot connect. Very much on that human level. People can’t connect to all the benefits the internet has to offer. They don’t have that democratisation of information.’

Open access for all

To illustrate the point, Dr Garson points to the Russian war in Ukraine and the moment, during the sanctions’ early days, where there was a call for Russia to be cut off from the internet.

‘Mykhailo Fedorov [Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine and Minister of Digital Transformation] put out a call to internet organisations to cut RU off the internet,’ she explains. ‘But, the internet organisations, quite rightly, pushed back and said “no”. We can cut off certain names – maybe the Russian military. But, fundamentally, cutting off a whole country on the basis of political division, that’s not what the internet is about. Who are you punishing in the end?’

Continuing, she says: ‘Permissionless, as we talk about it in the report, is more about permissionless innovation… Some people think it’s about pre-thinking all the negative externalities before you roll something out. The problem with that is, this slows down innovation… The exponential growth we’re experience in technology, we’re seeing that has slowed, where people have had to match European standards. You can argue that it’s a good thing – we wouldn’t have had to deal with some of the misuses of technology we’re seeing... The point is, it’s about not over-regulating something that doesn’t exist yet. That would contract innovation.

‘I worry more about resilience,’ she explains. ‘Is it guaranteed that you can open your computer and be able to send the message you want to send and trust that it’ll get to where you want? There are multiple tensions... Multiple stress points. On one level we have cyber crime and malicious actors, people manipulating information and [denying access]. On another level, we have geopolitical stress points and we’re seeing those right through the internet’s stack. We’re seeing this in a big way with the semiconductor industry, which is part of [the internet’s] basis.’

Threats to the internet’s resilience come in other forms too. In mid-2021 a problem with San Francisco based Fastly Inc – a content delivery network – caused a mass scale internet outage. The global blackout lasted for eight hours and took internet giants such as the New York Times, Bloomberg and Reddit offline.

Giants and their roles in the story

The internet’s goliaths also pose conundrums too. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and all the rest are so large and control such a deep stack of internet infrastructure.

‘If you look down through the internet stack, from the cloud down to the sub-sea cables, you get a much bigger proliferation... You have Google, AWS and the rest all consolidating,’ explains Dr Garson. ‘That creates a tension point... Is the internet always available all the way through the stack? All this asks a question about building in resilience, “what are the back-ups?”’.

Continuing, she says: ‘I’m not anti-big tech companies... I’m very much an optimist. But, we’re seeing big tech companies as geopolitical actors. Just thinking about Ukraine [the companies] actually tipped the balance of power in the conflict. Think about grand strategy… You cut communication before you invade. It’s an old fashioned idea – siege, cut communication, invade. But you had Elon Musk Providing Starlink and Microsoft moving data out of the country and Google turning off location services... Providing VPNs in Russia so people can still access the internet – this has all shifted strategy.’

What interests Dr Garson is, what are the decision making processes inside companies that come before these technology based interventions? She says: ‘If you look at their statements, they say things like “we morally feel”. That’s great. But, that always reminds me of that Dennis the Constitutional Peasant sketch from Monty Python.’

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For those who haven’t seen it or need their memories jogging, Dennis, while going about his daily routine of digging and bickering is repressed by the king. The question is, who made the king into the king? The answer is: The Lady Of The Lake held Excalibur aloft from the bosom of the water, signifying – by divine provenance – that Arthur was king.

‘Strange women lying in ponds is no basis for a system of government,’ quotes Dr Garson. ‘It’s a great line. But, it shows that though moral judgement is great, it’s not necessarily the basis upon which trillion dollar companies should make decisions. There needs to be more accountability and clarity.’

Finishing her point, she says: ‘To what extent do these companies have access to decision making? To what extent are they listening to those decisions? If we’ve got companies that have bigger capitalisations than countries and have bigger impact than some countries, how do they need to set themselves up? Do they, need a State Department?’

Fake news makes real harm

So, we’ve looked at some of the problems the internet is facing on many levels, those including technical and geopolitical. This poses a question: how do we protect the internet from further harm and ourselves from the fallout?

‘I love that question,’ Dr Garson says. ‘How do we protect the internet? It requires a multifaceted approach. On one level you have things like Biden’s Declaration for the Future of the Internet.’

The US headed initiative is a political commitment among partners to advance a positive vision for the internet. The grand vision saw 60 countries sign and, for such a document, it is remarkably short in length. Critically, it says: ‘As we increasingly work, communicate, connect, engage, learn, and enjoy leisure time using digital technologies, our reliance on an open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure internet will continue to grow. Yet we are also aware of the risks inherent in that reliance and the challenges we face.’

But, the declaration is just a declaration – not a statement of deliverables and concrete intent. Also, key powers such as China and India aren’t among the sixty signatories.

‘There are a few of these alliances… What we’re suggesting is a Digital Infrastructure and Defence Alliance, DIDA,’ says Dr Garson, describing what could be thought of as a NATO for the internet. ‘It aims to put some freedom back into the system for countries that are built on Chinese architecture (countries like Latin America and Africa where China rolled out their infrastructure). That’s a reality that’s not going to go away. On the geopolitical level, that has the potential to create leverage points and tensions – particularly when these countries come to vote on internet standards.’

Continuing, she explains: ‘DIDA looks at how countries can vote with their own interest, not another country’s. And if one country says “we’ll cut off your deep-sea cable or your semi conductor supplies” there will be help. So, it’s a NATO for the internet.’

The report reads: ‘A member-based DIDA would allow states to cooperate while knowing that their key infrastructure is not at risk. Modelled along the lines of a NATO alliance, partners would provide critical backup, similar to NATO Article 5, if a fellow alliance partner was subject to action affecting their connectivity or free use of the internet.’

With the report focusing on the grand, global and macro level forces that are acting on the internet it does, in a way, pose one final question: ‘What do I do as an internet citizen? How can I help?’ In that way the movement to protect the planet from global warming embraces individual action.

Dr Garson says: ‘I think it comes down to education and generational shift. We’re going to need to teach people to use digital wallets, for example. We used to teach people how to sign a cheque. And there’s a need to teach information recognition. Finland, have a really good model – teaching children who are quite young how to spot disinformation. Getting them to question, to understand filter bubbles and understand mass information. Critical thinking... ’

The internet, as Dr Garson says is a ‘life blood’. Without it we’ll struggle to solve today’s biggest problems like global warming and pandemics. We’ll also struggle to solve the smaller, human level challenges such as loneliness and isolation. The internet is however in a vulnerable phase of its evolution. We all - leaders, makers, doers and users – have our place to play in creating the internet we want.