Over the last few months there has been a flood of reports from a host of journalists as well as me, predicting the imminent fragmentation of the Internet we have all known” an unrestricted global network. Some, including Eric Schmidt of Google, and others have argued that it is a recent phenomenon precipitated largely by the NSA Prsim and Thinthread snooping of all Internet traffic, and perhaps also including Chinese military snooping. On the other side of this debate, Bill Gates, Vin Cerf, and Mark Andreeson have all pooh poohed the end of the Internet as we know it, arguing that it is “too big to fail.” Where have we heard that before? The reality is that the fragmentation of the Internet has been evolving for years as numerous governments attempt to prevent the Internet from undermining their power and authority, long before the NSA, GCHQ and the Chinese military began messing with the Net. The old Internet we knew is dead, and we had better get accustomed to dealing with the NEW Internet
The World Wide Web celebrated its 25th birthday recently. Today the global network serves almost 3 billion people, and hundreds of thousands more join each day. If the Internet were a country, its economy would be among the five largest in the world.
In 2011, according to the World Economic Forum, growth in the digital economy created six million new jobs. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that transborder online traffic grew 18-fold between 2005 and 2012 and that the global flow of goods, services, and investments—which reached $26 trillion in 2012—could more than triple by 2025. Facebook has launched a major initiative, in partnership with tech giants including Samsung and Qualcomm, dedicated to making the Internet available to the approximately two-thirds of the world’s population not yet connected. Cisco forecasts that between 2013 and 2022, the so-called Internet of Things will generate $14.4 trillion in value for global enterprises.
Yet all of this growth and…
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Filed under: Big Data, cyber attacks, Cyber Intelligence, Espionage, Ethics, Internet Privacy, Internet Traffic Policy Management, Managemnent, NSA, Science and Technology, World Wide Web Tagged: CIA, Edward Snowden, espionage, featured, internet security, management, Narus, NSA Internet surveillance, P-Cube
