“Some of us might like to believe that the genie is out of the bottle and that we all have access to an unstoppable decentralized network. In reality, the internet is entirely controlled by central authorities.”

Arrgh! This kind of thing drives me crazy. If we could stop conflating the Internet (which is a combination of networking protocols) and the physical network (which is a bunch of cables and antennas and switches), we might be able to have a useful dialogue about how to reduce the Internet’s vulnerability to coercive measures by changing the shape of the network.

In the end, that’s what Rushkoff advocates; I just wish he wouldn’t muddy the water so.

Stay with me, kids; I’m going to say this again slowly: The network is the wires and antennas and stuff. The Internet is the way information is organised to travel across it.

More to the point, the Internet is a very specific way for data to travel across it:

• It doesn’t rely on a middle-man. I might choose to use Facebook for chat, but I don’t have to. I could connect straight to your computer or phone and chat away.
• It doesn’t need a road map. In effect, the data packets just go hitch-hiking across the network with a sign saying ‘San José’ – or whatever.
• It doesn’t see borders the same way some other network protocols do. In fact, that’s why it’s an Inter net: Because it routes traffic between different networks.

Once more:

• Internet = you & me talking.
• Network = the road system that allows you and me to get together to talk.

There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Oh, as long as I’m being pedantic: It’s Internet-with-a-capital-I. It’s a proper noun referring to a very specific thing. It’s like a country with all the geography taken out. It still has to have a capital.

The recent decision by the Mubarak regime in Egypt to cut off all Internet access for its citizens is a textbook example of using a silver bullet to shoot oneself in the foot.

The whys and wherefores of how they’ve gone about doing so provide a useful opportunity to understand the paradox of control over the Internet and the costs involved when governments and other actors indulge their desire to dam the torrent of information that flows across their networks.

In order to do that, we need to dispel a rather pesky myth.

Perhaps the most dangerous misconception of the Internet is its survivability. It’s true that, as one information activist put it, the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. But that statement is predicated on the actual presence of an Internet in the first place.

That may sound like a silly statement, but the Internet might not be as enduring as many assume it to be.

While many of the software and communications protocols that define the Internet are, by design, remarkably resistant to outside control, the physical networks through which our data passes are not nearly so robust.

James Cowie, a network analyst from Renesys Corporation, has written excellent analyses of state intervention in national communications both during the post-election strife in Iran and more recently in Egypt. Using forensic evidence gathered in real time, he constructs a vivid scenario: In contrast to Iranian authorities, who elected to use physical choke-points in the communications infrastructure to reduce the flow of information to a trickle, Egyptian authorities appear to have instructed all national Internet Service Providers simply to cut all communications with the outside world.

Starting at midnight (Egyptian time) on the 27th of January 2011, Egypt’s largest ISPs began disappearing from the Internet. Within a period of about 13 minutes, they simply stopped delivering data to and from their customers.

Cowie writes:

“[T]his sequencing looks like people getting phone calls, one at a time, telling them to take themselves off the air. Not an automated system that takes all providers down at once; instead, the incumbent leads and other providers follow meekly one by one until Egypt is silenced.”

How did this happen? Every large ISP participates in a cooperative system called the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. BGP allows them to discover how traffic destined to a remote network should be directed. Simply put, each ISP announces which address blocks it supports. These blocks can represent tens or even hundreds of thousands of individual machine addresses.

Designed for simpler times, BGP is a trust-based protocol. It relies implicitly of the good faith of all participants to continue working. This makes it remarkably vulnerable to the machinations of states or organisations whose interests don’t align with others’. Back in 2008, Pakistan Telecom caused a furore when, for a little over 2 hours, their bungled attempt to use BGP to block YouTube domestically resulted in the site disappearing from much of the Internet.

Just last year, a change to BGP traffic announcements resulted in about 15% of all Internet traffic being routed through networks in China for a brief period. This resulted in breathless speculation that the disruption was not accidental. Some claimed that it amounted to a reconnaissance in force, as it were, a probing of the global Internet to determine its resilience in the face of attack.

Intentional or not, these disruptions to the BGP apparatus make it abundantly clear that choke points exist on the Internet and that they are remarkably easy to subvert.

Debate continues to rage in technical circles about what can be done to mitigate BGP’s innate deficiencies. Changes will doubtless be necessary. But the liability wouldn’t be so grave if our physical communications networks weren’t so hopelessly centralised.

Egypt offers us a particularly vivid example of this. A country of over 80 million people, it has only a half a dozen or so large Internet providers. Only one of them, the Noor Group, initially resisted the demand to drop services. Some have speculated that its continued online presence was due to its extensive list of blue chip clients, including many banks and the Egyptian Stock Exchange.

Ultimately, though, it was a limited victory. Noor advertised only 83 of the roughly 3500 data routes in and out of Egypt. They were eventually forced off the air a week after their IT confrères.

In Iran, population 72 million, there are only 5 significant international links, all of which flow through a single Government-run office. Such centralisation makes it easy for the state to exert its influence.

(One European-owned company, Vodaphone, washed its hands of the decision to cut service to its Egyptian customers, claiming that the Mubarak regime had the legal right to issue the order. This rhetorical line apes the rationale provided by Nokia-Siemens when it was discovered that their equipment enabled Iranian authorities to block most traffic and eavesdrop on the rest.)

The Internet as a principle –that is, the idea of an open network allowing free communication regardless of source or sender– is not as popular as some might believe. It made its way into the commercial world more by stealth than by deliberation. Telcos didn’t really understand the Internet as a service; they just knew they had to offer it in order to compete.

One thing was clear to them: The sum of all services across a global network was clearly more valuable than those offered by a single provider. Equally attractive was the perception that these services came more or less for free with the connection.

But the seductive power of the Net hasn’t changed attitudes entirely.

Telecommunications companies, with a long legacy of market-controlling behaviour, still build and deploy their infrastructure using centralised models. Recently, some of them have begun lobbying for the right to exert control over the data that passes over their networks, potentially penalising services that compete with their own. Comcast, one of the largest ISPs in the US, recently got approval to acquire NBC Universal and its content-creation ecosystem, giving rise to fears that they might leverage their control over the information pipeline to dictate what passes through it.

Put simply, carriers would love nothing better than to go back to the telephone service model, where fees are based on where you are and who you talk to, with no conversation possible unless you’ve paid your toll.

The principle of an end-to-end network –that is, one that allows direct, unmediated connections between two parties– militates strongly in the opposite direction. Its appeal is remarkably seductive, leading most Internet users to view with displeasure the telcos’ (or governments’) desire to mediate communications.

Renesys quite rightly remarks that if cuts to Egypt’s Internet had lasted much longer, the reduction in commercial activity could have been catastrophic for the nation.

Furthermore, Cowie remarks, it wasn’t only Egypt’s pipelines that were at risk:

“[T]he majority of Internet connectivity between Europe and Asia actually passes through Egypt. The Gulf States, in particular, depend critically on the Egyptian fiber-optic corridor for their connectivity to world markets.

“Are the folks at Davos thinking about this? They should be.”

In a perfect world, consumer choice and basic business commonsense would always win. But the problem is that centralised networks not only cost a lot of money (placing their design and construction into the hands of the most powerful), they make a lot of money, too.

In monetary and political terms, the wealth of the network itself tends to pool rather than to flow.

A fundamental change has already overtaken the public’s perception about the value and nature of digital communications. Passive consumption of news through the television is considered passé, or at least diminished in relation to the sharing of photos, videos and words across the Internet.

As individual control over the flow of information rises, central control wanes. And this, obviously, is the crux of the dilemma facing businesses and governments across North Africa and throughout the world. They are belatedly coming to realise that they are fighting a many-headed hydra. As they cut off one avenue of communication, another rears its head.

But that hydra has a body, and the body is the network itself.

As this column goes to press, it appears that Egypt’s decision to cut off the Internet failed in every important regard. One protester is reported to have said, “F*** the internet! I have not seen it since Thursday and I am not missing it.… Go tell Mubarak that the people’s revolution does not need his damn internet!”

I would be amazed, however, if this fact led other governments to act differently, should they find themselves in a similar situation. Indeed, the US Congress is currently considering legislation that would provide the President with an ‘Internet Kill Switch’ for use in case of emergency.

Likewise, I see no evidence that the ultimate futility of attempting to control the flow of information will change attitudes in the board rooms and offices where our increasingly centralised networks are planned. For telcos, the challenge is merely technical.

For the Internet –as it was originally intended– to become fully realised and fully resistant to coercion, the devices and infrastructure through which our data travels will need to reflect the same principle of decentralisation as the software and protocols we use today. That implies the construction of communications devices that are very different from the locked-in, network-centric phones, tablets and computers we’re familiar with. I can think of no short-term scenario in which the development of such products will take place in any significant way.

For some time to come, we will continue to live in a world in which the powerful continue to load silver bullets and take aim squarely at their own feet.

Say what you like about wikileaks and their recent dump of over 250,000 US diplomatic cables, but there is probably not a single researcher in International Relations, History or Political Science without a tingle in their pants today. Never in modern history has so much information been made available in such a readily accessible format. This is, for researchers, a gift that will keep on giving for decades to come.

The thing that impressed me most from my brief perusal of the 200-odd documents released on the first day was not so much the content as the quality of the analysis. The cables were well-written and obviously well-researched. I suspect that there’s more than one junior foreign officer out there with a quiet smile on their face today, because finally the world will see just how good they are.

Yes, I’m ignoring completely the ethics and morality of the situation. That horse is out of the barn, and incidentally, what a barn it is….

These cables will provide more insight and understanding into American diplomacy than anything else ever has. Just as access to hitherto proprietary source code sometimes unearths dirty secrets of which even its author is ashamed, there is likely to be a lot of unpleasantness to be found in the cables.

I think the longer term result, however, will be that much of what’s good about the US diplomatic corps (and there’s a lot of that) will assist countless others to improve their own work. In fact I think it’s likely there might be more than one diplomat that might actually be relieved to see the unspeakable spoken aloud. This torrent of data just might break more logjams than it creates.

The rise of the Free Software movement in the 1990s increased access to the source code that runs our computers and caused fundamental changes in software development. Their echoes are still quite strong today. Code that was once hidden behind thick corporate walls was now being handed about in a vast open source bazaar. This discomfited many vendors who were dismayed to discover that their crown jewels could become valueless overnight as software became commoditised.

A lot of dirty laundry got aired in the process. Bug-reports, software update schedules, coding practices all became subjects of open discussion and, yes, dispute. Tolerance for second-rate code dwindled significantly. Emphasis began to fall more and more on results. As one acerbic commenter wrote: “A single line of running code trumps a thousand lines of argument.”

Companies who attempted to retain their secretive ways were simply bypassed and their flaws exposed for all to see. Sound familiar?

In the late 1990s, Microsoft identified Linux specifically and Free Software generally as the greatest strategic threat to their organisation. They were right. Microsoft’s stagnation is partly attributable to the advantage that FOSS has given several of its competitors. IBM, Apple and Google have all leveraged open source software to jump-start various endeavours that compete directly with Microsoft. Likewise, Microsoft’s need to increase the pace of development resulted directly in their death-march to Windows Vista.

Just as Microsoft was able to drive Netscape Communications out of the market by commoditising the web browser, others are commoditising vast swathes of the computing industry by leveraging FOSS.

The commoditisation of information proceeds apace, and although the stakes are perceived to be higher in this case, the effects will probably be similar in nature. A fractious dialectic is already emerging between those who truly believe in the benefits of information resources like those circulated to millions of US military and government staffers on SIPRNET, and those who seek to leverage proprietary knowledge for their country’s -and sometimes their own- gain.

All secrets are like kindling. Used at the right time, gossip can provide warmth, build allegiance and influence. Used rashly, well… you know where this is heading. In that sense, wikileaks may seem like a 10 year old boy with a stolen box of matches. But applied judiciously and with a sober sense of timing, the same principles of openness as a default stance and and a predilection toward sharing that are at the heart of free software development (and the Internet itself) could usefully animate international diplomacy.

To be perfectly clear: I’m not suggesting that there is no need for secrecy whatsoever in diplomacy. I’m suggest that, as we’ve discovered with programming processes, secrecy might prove to be less necessary -and effective- to security than it appears to be.

But what I’d like to know -and what McAllister conveniently forgets to mention- is: What, exactly, constitutes a ‘True Data Disaster?’

Are we talking about a leak that effectively kills a company’s credibility dead? I don’t think so, because if incompetence or data mismanagement had any kind of real-world relationship with a company’s success, Yahoo!, Amazon, TJX and Heartland Payment Systems and dozens of others would at very least have suffered losses in stock value following their colossally poor management practices.

Are we talking criminal abuse of private information? If that were the case, then Microsoft, Yahoo! and all the nation’s telcos (save Qwest) should be facing imminent demise because of their complicity in the unconstitutional breach of their customers’ privacy in the US Government’s domestic spying programme.

Are we talking straight-up data loss? If so, then Microsoft (hmm, that name keeps coming up) should have taken a dive when they managed quite literally to lose all of Danger Networks’ data.

Or are we talking non-performance and generalised uselessness on a scale that beggars comprehension? If that were the case, then why do large consultancies still manage to win multi-million dollar contracts that suck up centuries of developer time and never actually deliver a thing? Think of the FBI’s famous foray into modernisation, the now-legendary death of the UK’s online medical database and any of a hundred other projects that ended up entirely written off (to the tune of 100s of millions each) without so much as a downward tick in the value of the contracting companies involved.

It seems that in the esoteric world of noughts and ones, belief matters far more than empirical truth, making a true Data Disaster literally inconceivable.

There can’t be a Data Disaster today, because we can’t imagine what one would look like. Likewise, there won’t be a Data Disaster until we become capable of realising that they’re all around us, happening every day.

Now, in 2010, we’ve spent the better part of a decade helping people get online, getting people in front of computers and teaching them to make the most of the learning and social opportunities that the Internet provides.

The recent release of Ookla’s Household Download Index allows us to measure how far we, as a nation, have come.

Uptake on Internet is still limited to a tiny minority. The pool of Internet users has risen substantially in real numbers, but as a percentage of population, the numbers are still so small that, in a recent national telecoms survey, the researchers declined even to ask about Internet. The data set was too small to be relevant.

Prices today have effectively risen, megabit for megabit, relative to developed markets. Oh, they’ve dropped from the stratospheric levels they used to inhabit (US $1000/month for 128 Kbps and a 100 MB download limit). But you still pay over US $500/month for a single megabit which, occasionally, actually delivers a megabit of bandwidth. When it works.

Most depressing of all, the total amount of bandwidth available for the entire country is only slightly more than the average bandwidth capacity of a single household in Seoul, Korea.

Let me say that again: There are people in Seoul – and countless other cities in the world – who have more bandwidth at their personal disposal than a quarter of a million people here in the Pacific.

Pent-up demand for Internet is easily on the same scale as we’ve witnessed for mobile telephony services these last two years. Informal markers (like the average number of facebook friends among ni-Vanuatu Internet users) show that people love the potential of the Internet and will go to lengths to access it.

But nobody is willing to actually invest in it.

Even Digicel Vanuatu, who over a year ago imported a new CTO with extensive wireless Internet experience, have yet to provide an offering viable for day-to-day use even for the average expat customer.

Frankly, I find it depressing that, in spite of years of advocacy, lobbying and awareness-raising, the movers and shakers here in Vanuatu don’t appear to have learned a thing about the importance of either communications or technology.

On the 12th of January, David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer, made a startling announcement: Google – and dozens of other companies operating in China – had been the target of concerted online attacks originating from China. Google also claimed that the attackers, targeting human rights activists inside China and around the world, used the activists’ own PCs to take over numerous GMail accounts.

These attacks used ‘0-day’ exploits, hitherto-unknown vulnerabilities in common software applications. In a Wired Magazine interview, security analyst Ryan Olson stated that the code itself was unremarkable, but that ‘the sophistication here is all about the fact they were able to target the right people using a previously unknown vulnerability.’

Businesses and governments face online acts of vandalism and attempts at corporate espionage all the time. Even this attack, which exploited flaws in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Adobe’s Acrobat reader software, was ‘not ground-breaking’, according to security expert Mikko Hypponen.

‘We see this fairly regularly,’ he told the BBC, but ‘most companies just never go public.’

Running against tide of companies flooding into China, Google has retaliated against these intrusions by stating that they will no longer censor google.cn, their Chinese search site. If that can’t be done within Chinese law, wrote Drummond, it ‘may well mean having to shut down google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.’

With annual revenues of around US$150 million (some estimates range far higher), China is a small but significant part of Google’s global operation. Pulling out, however, is commonly seen as passing up on the largest single consumer market in the world. Virtually all large online search providers have quietly acquiesced to China’s diktat regarding search results.

Some, indeed, have gone above and beyond the call. Reporters Without Borders accused Yahoo of becoming a ‘police informant’ following the 2004 arrest and imprisonment of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist. Yahoo had apparently exceeded the strict requirements of the law in granting Chinese authorities access to Shi’s offshore email accounts.

Microsoft, renowned for their winner-take-all approach to business, finds itself in a similarly subservient position. With trademark deftness, China largely de-fanged one of the most effective and brutal corporate negotiating teams in the world. Negotiators got virtually everything they wanted. China pays about 10% per license of what other governments do. They not only negotiated access to the Windows source code, they have to right to alter it to suit their purposes.

Just this week, both Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and founder Bill Gates made public pronouncements simultaneously espousing the principle of Internet freedom and respect for Chinese law. They did not elaborate on how they intend to square this circle. Gates characterised Chinese censorship as ‘very limited’ in a recent interview on US network television.

For its part, China angrily denounced Google’s assertions, calling them inaccurate and suggesting they were motivated by outdated, imperialistic notions. They refused to draw any link between their censorship activities and the attacks on Google and others, stating unequivocally that such attacks are just as illegal in China as other countries. IT security experts remain convinced nonetheless that China sponsors such activities.

Despite strong pronouncements from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, most US businesses are holding their fire, according to the Wall Street Journal. Nobody wants to miss out on China’s rapidly growing consumer market.

The principle of Internet freedom is increasingly under attack in other countries as well. When questioned about their complicity in the suppression of Iranian online dissent, Nokia-Siemens’ phlegmatic reply was that they hadn’t done anything unusual. Most European and North American carriers are required to make wholesale surveillance and censorship possible, too.

Australian Minister Stephen Conroy has been steadily advancing an agenda that includes censorship of online material ‘refused classification’ by an Australian ratings body.

Businesses and governments both have reason to feel uncomfortable about the Wild West atmosphere that pervades the Internet. Its organised anarchy and ability to reformulate itself from one day to the next makes it a threat to many traditional business practices as well as to governments leery of dissent.

Increasingly, network carriers and content providers are cooperating to introduce measures to make the Internet a ‘walled garden’ rather than an open range. This implies a top-to-bottom approach encompassing centralised networks and wholesale filtering, copy-protection technologies and the criminalisation of file-sharing as well as computing devices on which only pre-approved software can run.

Yet again, people are seeking technological solutions to problems that are social in nature.
So far, Internet activist Perry Barlow’s affirmation that ‘the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it’ remains true. But with the increasingly evident willingness of corporate and government agents to create and use what MIT researcher Benjamin Hill terms ‘anti-features’, we may soon find that there’s nowhere else to route to.

Copy protection mechanisms included on CDs, DVDs and other media only serve to inconvenience legitimate users. People intent on copying quickly rip new versions and shared them widely. Likewise, content filters on individual networks are easily avoided through the use of relatively anonymous Internet cafés and proxy servers, allowing people to access contentious content even over rigidly controlled networks. Locked-down phones and computing devices are quickly ‘jail-broken’.

But with the imposition of control over the actual cables and connections through which Internet traffic passes, proponents of Internet freedom lose their ability to manoeuvre. Their data can no longer route around censorship. For them, the damage is complete. The Internet has effectively ceased to exist.

Anti-features such as copy protections, filters and firewalls add to the cost of accessing information. They make things harder, not better. It would be far cheaper to rely on people to establish ethical and moral norms than to impose technical solutions which do little to deter the determined and much to inconvenience everyone else.

Often enough, their closed nature makes anti-features more susceptible to 0-day exploits, exactly the kind of attack that left Google and dozens of other companies so exposed.

Such measures have only one significant virtue: Technological solutions don’t require the consent of the people.

As Internet services become more common in Vanuatu, local businesses have been using it to supplement their normal advertising and communications channels. In their enthusiasm – and, it must be said, naivete – they’ve overlooked a few fundamental rules of good online behaviour.

Businesses and individuals (there’s no need to name and shame; they know who they are and, if you have an email account, so do you) have more and more often taken to sending unsolicited promotional and editorial emails to hundreds of Vanuatu addresses.

Regardless of their good intentions, these companies and individuals are spamming. In other countries, it would be illegal. Here, it’s a nuisance for virtually all involved.

Before I go on, I need to emphasise that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the idea of promoting one’s business via email. It’s a core marketing practice for virtually all businesses with ready access to the Internet. The problem here is not what these people are doing; the problem lies in how they go about it.

The Devil, I often say, is in the details, and IT consists entirely of details. So bear with me as I walk through a few small but critical details that make all the difference in the world between a friendly email that will likely be welcomed and what we all know as spam (and a few other unprintable terms as well)….

PRIVACY

When you send an email with a lot of people listed in the TO or the CC field, anyone who can see the email can see the address of all the other recipients. Not a problem, you might think; Port Vila’s a small town, and we’re all friends here. That’s true enough, but we’re not the only ones who can see the distribution list. Virus- and bot-infected computers quite commonly ‘harvest’ addresses by trawling through people’s inboxes.

Human scammers can take advantage of this information, too. In one notable recent case, someone pretending to be a ni-Vanuatu man trapped in London without funds sent around an email asking for money. As far as I can tell, no one was fooled – this time.

NOISE

On more than one occasion in the past, I’ve seen these mass circulation emails descend into online chaos. One person clicks the Reply To All button and says, ‘please stop sending these’. Within a few minutes, a few others pipe up and say, ‘Me too!’. Before too long, what began as one unwelcome email has become a maelstrom of online ‘noise’. Between those replying to all asking to be removed from the distribution list, others lecturing them on proper online behaviour (or ‘netiquette’), and still others telling everyone else to shut up and leave them alone, everyone’s inbox becomes polluted with useless, irrelevant messages and angry, increasingly belligerent replies.

It goes without saying that none of us would ever want our name associated with this kind of situation.

UN-NEIGHBOURLY BEHAVIOUR

There’s a world of difference between a loud party at a neighbour’s house and a loud party at a neighbour’s house… that you’re attending. The difference, of course, is choice. If you choose to receive promotional emails, then you hardly have any cause to complain if they arrive. In fact, one would expect you’d be glad of them.

If you have not chosen to receive these emails, though, they can seem pretty darn intrusive if they distract you from more important correspondence.

TRUST

During an online discussion of local spam, one local vendor complained bitterly that he couldn’t use his own distribution lists, consisting entirely of clients who had voluntarily signed up for his notices, because TVL was blocking him for spamming.

The problem here was unfortunate, but understandable: TVL has no choice but to take administrative steps to shield its customers from abusive spammers, but sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between legitimate email behaviour and illegitimate. Mass circulation spam is so common these days that it’s hardly surprising if TVL, in its zeal to provide a reasonable and enjoyable Internet service, occasionally blocks the good with the bad.

The local business houses and individuals who spam have effectively ruined things for the rest of the community who do occasionally circulate email to a large local audience.

Port Vila is a small town, and circulating email is a timely and effective way to get in touch with many in the community. But if you’re thinking about doing so, either to promote a cause or your business, you really do need to get professional assistance with this.

It might seem simpler and more efficient to simply blast out messages at everone in your address book, but you really do need to think twice before proceeding. Before you do, imagine you’re sitting in a jam-packed movie theatre, at the very best part of the very best film, and then ask yourself what it would take to make you jump up and start shouting to everyone in the theatre.

That is what spam looks like to the rest of us.

It may look like spam works, but appearances can deceive. When you send unsolicited email to large numbers of people at a time, you may think you’re gaining business, because the only people to feed back to you are those who took no offense. Those who did take offense, on the other hand, will likely never talk to you again.

They do, on the other hand, talk to me. I’m writing this column at the urging of numerous individuals and local organisations.

You may not think your spamming is hurting you. I’m here to tell you that it is.

Be a good neighbour. Stop spamming. If you want to use email to promote your business, talk to one of the several local IT services companies. They know how to do it right.

News has leaked out in dribs and drabs over the last several months about a US-led drive to negotiate an international treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. Conducted under a veil of secrecy, these negotiations have been the source of considerable speculation and not a little alarm among advocates of online freedom.

Part of the reason for the alarm is the utter lack of publicly verifiable information concerning the content of the treaty. When US organisations attempted to gain access to a copy of the draft, their government withheld them, citing national security, of all things.

Intellectual Property expert professor Michael Geist writes, “The United States has drafted the chapter under enormous secrecy, with selected groups granted access under strict non-disclosure agreements and other countries (including Canada) given physical, watermarked copies designed to guard against leaks.”

In spite of their best efforts, however, details of the online enforcement aspects of the treaty leaked out last week, following a negotiating round in Seoul, South Korea.

The details don’t look good.

Geist summarised the broader strokes in a recent blog post, noting that the leak “provides firm confirmation that the treaty is not a counterfeiting trade, but a copyright treaty.”

The net effect of the proposed rules is that copyright would be radically redefined. The ability to make copies of or deconstruct other people’s content, for example, would be severely limited. Activities that breach copyright would be subject to increased scrutiny and penalties for all involved – including, potentially, Internet Service Providers who provide the connection over which such breaches occurred.

This is a real worry for ISPs. iiNet, one of Australia’s largest service providers, was recently sued by media organisations merely for allowing its customers to download unlawfully copied movies. Online rights watchdog Electronic Frontiers Australia remarked, “This lawsuit is the latest attempt by the movie industry to bully Internet Service Providers into becoming copyright police.”

ACTA would make this the norm. If the leaks are accurate, it would effectively make ISPs responsible for the conduct of their customers. While ISPs have traditionally cooperated with courts and police in their investigations, they worry that they’re being made liable for actions over which they have no real control.

Consumers find this troubling too, because such a regime would almost certainly impose a level of surveillance unacceptable to most. In the worst case scenario, it could create a situation similar to the infamous Great Firewall of China, in which everyone’s online activities are under constant scrutiny.

Pacific Island nations have thus far played no part whatsoever in these top-secret negotiations. Whatever regime emerges, however, would almost certainly be imposed on them in years to come. Australia’s copyright laws are already increasingly circumscribed by the bilateral trade agreement they signed with the US. Their participation in ACTA negotiations has been characterised as simply ensuring that they remain ‘in the tent’.

Jordan Carter of InternetNZ, a New Zealand Internet governance group, warns that Pacific Island nations need to be aware of the progress of these negotiations, as “the agreement would set a de facto standard for anticounterfeiting policy.”

Carter went on to stress that we can’t really be certain of the exact nature of this regime, as the details of both ACTA and PACER Plus have yet to be officially disclosed. Other commentators noted that it was more likely than not that ACTA’s requirements would be included in any regional trade dialogue, if only because of the perceived need in Australia to achieve a single regional solution.

If events transpire as anticipated, this could give rise to significant sovereignty concerns. EFA’s Nic Suzor states:

“The threat that we see is that sovereign states abdicate their responsibility to determine acceptable copyright policies for their own countries, and are forced into the harsh measures that are being pushed by the US copyright industry. We believe firstly that these measures mostly do not reach an appropriate balance, and second that developing copyright policy in secret trade negotiations which are essentially forced upon nation states are rarely likely to be an effective and beneficial mode of creating legislation.”

Viewed in this light, ACTA’s secretive negotiation process seems distinctly alarming. In practical terms, though, it’s unlikely that the treaty’s provisions would have significant impact on Pacific Islanders’ day-to-day lives. Like so many treaties before, it might simply be ignored. More to the point, the rest of the world might simply ignore us.

In the lead-up to its first abortive attempt at WTO accession, Vanuatu voted through laws with respect to the Berne Conventions on Copyright, but neglected to gazette them. Neither the vote nor the neglect seem to have ruffled many feathers.

A more likely scenario in which ACTA’s draconian copyright regime might make itself felt here in Vanuatu is if a foreign-owned ISP were to set up shop and simply apply the same set of rules to its Vanuatu customer base as it does to its overseas customers. In such a circumstance, however, market forces would mitigate against undue inconvenience. If people don’t like how they’re treated, they can simply cross the road to the competition.

A number of Port Vila schools have recently begun to take the Internet seriously. Assisted by veteran and novice IT volunteers, they’ve invested their meagre computing resources in an undertaking designed to help teachers create a richer and more open learning environment.

As with all things, it started small. Circumstance threw a few IT professionals together and led them to collaborate to improve their own children’s education. One thing led to another, and now we’re beginning to see the first fruits of integration of technology with teaching in Vanuatu.

The story begins five months ago when four parents, all of them seasoned IT professionals, began to chat about how to improve conditions at Central School, where their children were enrolled. Before very long they were at the core of a group of over 30 parents and teachers, all devoted to taking advantage of computers and the Internet in order to improve the quality of education.

This may sound familiar. It’s not the first time in Vanuatu that parents have moved mountains one pebble at a time to supplement their school’s limited resources. Nor is it the first time that teachers have been able to indulge their personal and professional enthusiasm for their vocation by working with the community at large.

But there are a few unique aspects to this story.

First and foremost, it’s an exercise whose benefits run two ways. One of the key components in any IT-related project is to ensure that it’s supported. Especially in the early going, nothing kills an IT project more quickly than lack of support. It only takes a few moments of frustration to turn enthusiasm into ire.

George Tasso, one of Vanuatu’s more talented programmers, realised this early on. Recognising that his time and that of his colleagues was limited, he began casting around for others to assist.

He found his support in an unusual place: a young security guard working the night shift at his workplace. Keith Gordon had gone to VIT and trained as a carpenter, but like so many others in Vanuatu, had trouble finding steady work. He took the security job to pay the bills and began exploring a new passion: computers.

His excitement with technology led him to chat with Tasso, who immediately saw an opportunity to expand on the progress he and others had made at Central School. Following a conversation with the principal of a school located right next door, Tasso was able to provide an outlet for Gordon’s enthusiasm.

Today, the soft-spoken young man works nights, studies part time at USP and still finds time to provide IT support to the staff of Ecole Centre Ville. He’s already installed new software on the school’s computers, cabled them together and established wireless Internet access in the senior teachers’ lounge. Now he’s taking his first steps onto the web as he designs the school’s website, kindly donated by TVL.

Tasso’s approached is comprehensive. He knows from experience that the only way to learn computers is by getting your hands dirty. Linking young volunteers with schools is a perfect chance to support both at once. Each volunteer gets paired with a mentor, in order to ensure that every problem gets solved quickly.

To Tasso, computers are not an end in themselves. He’s not particularly interested in teaching word processing and spreadsheet skills. That’s useful, but he knows from experience that if one can grasp the basics, the particulars of a given software package take care of themselves.

Far more important that teachers learn to leverage the wealth of information and presentation formats that the Internet makes available. Tasso strongly advocates for the use of Free and Open Source Software. These tools, he explains, are part of an open environment that is far more conducive to learning than standard business applications. They reward curiousity and expose their inner workings to anyone who cares to look.

The result, he feels, represents a ‘fresh start’ for those who use it. They’re not limited by preconceptions, and it’s far easier for them to adapt the software to their particular needs. Best of all, the software is generally available free of charge, and it’s not burdened by viruses and other shortcomings to which too many of us have become accustomed.

Tasso and his colleagues are now actively supporting IT volunteers at four Port Vila schools, with another in the works. While there are no lack of young volunteers ready to assist the schools – one colleague has organised no less than twenty of them in the Freswota neighbourhood alone – Tasso is beginning to worry that he might be reaching the limit of his own ability to provide a supportive mentoring role to them all.

The question now is how to continue. What has to date been an entirely organic venture, expanding and changing to fit the needs of individual schools and their staff, is soon going to have to transform itself into something more organised.

But not too organised. The hallmark of his work’s success has to date been its ability to speak to the immediate needs of the teachers. (Tasso jokes that once-reluctant teachers are now assigning his daughter Internet research as homework, which cuts into his own computer time at home.) If the process becomes too formalised, it runs the risk of become making teachers feel straitjacketed, bound into approaches and processes that might not fit well with their own inclinations and abilities.

It’s too early to say just yet how things will play out. But the effect of this infectious enthusiasm for learning among volunteers and teachers alike is indisputable. When I spoke with the principal of Ecole Centre Ville, he spoke in glowing terms of the entire experience.

From small things big things grow. This just one example of how access to the tools of learning enrich everyone who touches them.

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” – Leo Tolstoy

On Wednesday this week at a quiet ceremony in Chantilly’s Resort, Minister Rialuth Serge Vohor presented six organisations with telecommunications operator licenses. His action marked the beginning of a new chapter in Vanuatu’s integration into the wider technological world.

The Minister’s speech touched on many aspects of the technical and social challenge ahead of us, but its illuminating principle was his lifelong conviction that Vanuatu should control its own destiny. Acknowledging and applauding the invaluable assistance provided by numerous donor and commercial partners from overseas, he nonetheless displayed great satisfaction at seeing local operations moving into the spotlight.

There was an air of quiet excitement in the room as, after patient months of waiting, representatives from the six groups, along with Digicel Vanuatu CEO Tanya Menzies, strode to the front of the room to accept the newly signed documents.

At the risk of sounding like a giddy shoolchild, I wonder if everyone realises just how fundamentally this moment is going to affect our generation and the next.

We’ve had Internet services in Vanuatu for some time now and TVL has consistently worked to improve it. When I arrived here in 2003, an unlimited dial-up account cost 25,000 vatu per month. Today, a dedicated broadband line with roughly 3 times the capacity is available at about 20% of the price.

In 2003, it was possible – in theory at least – to connect from any telephone line. But that did mean being near a telephone line, and contending with all the other voice traffic coming and going. In practice, using the Internet regularly for anything but the most basic purposes in the islands was a challenge, to say the least. Today, we have broadband service in Vila and Santo (and soon in Tanna). And even if you’re not near a phone line, you can use TVL’s WiMax or Digicel’s GPRS service.

The pattern we’re seeing in Internet closely echoes what we saw in the months before Digicel rolled out its mobile telephone service, with a few critical differences. Prices have dropped, coverage and capacity have improved. If anything, TVL’s been even more aggressive this time in improving its core infrastructure, expanding its coverage area and reducing prices. It has clearly become a much more agile organisation than it once was. Consumers nationwide can only benefit from the result.

This time around, it’s Digicel that runs the risk (albeit a slight one) of being the one caught on the hop. On the same day the six new licenses were awarded, Digicel also received an amended license – essentially giving it the right to compete in all segments of the telecoms market.

I spoke with CEO Tanya Menzies about what Digicel’s plans regarding Internet services. When asked about becoming a full-service ISP, She said they were in the process of developing their business plan and didn’t want to make any firm pronouncements at that moment. She did, however, draw my attention to a recent contract between Digicel and Huawei to provide roaming wireless broadband in 5 Caribbean nations.

It’s no accident that Digicel’s new CTO is a wireless Internet veteran with a long list of large-scale network roll-outs to his credit. “That’s why we brought him here,” said Menzies, smiling.

I suspect, though, that most people’s first contact with the Internet here will be through smaller local commercial and community-based operations. Telsat Pacific has ambitious plans to push Internet service as widely as they can using a mix of small satellite dishes and wireless technology. Yumi Konek, an NGO-driven project designed to provide access to email to Vanuatu’s remotest areas, is already providing services in Aneityum and the Banks islands. The Pentecost community of Pangi and Malekula’s Southwest Bay are next.

No matter how you slice it, Internet will remain relatively expensive for some years to come. In addition to that, taking full advantage of the Internet involves a good deal more capital – both intellectual and technical – than using a mobile phone. So, for the majority in Vanuatu, the face of technology will be the neighbourhood geek who keeps the equipment chugging along.

My guess is that the biggest winners among our current heavy hitters will be those who push the support role closer to the customer by offering wholesale services to ‘Mom and Pop’ businesses operating in neighbourhoods throughout Vanuatu.

Pent-up demand for learning, for a glimpse of the outside world, is far greater than many people realise. If people in a remote village in South Malekula will clear a mountain hillside just to speak with their families, what lengths won’t others go to in order to explore the world? More importantly, what would parents not give to allow their children to do so?

The expansion of Internet use is not likely to follow the rocket-like trajectory of mobile services, but it will hit quickly and run deep. Too deep for some, I fear. Having lived on the bleeding and the trailing edge of technology (sometimes both at once), I find the contrast between the two is enough to cause a kind of cognitive whiplash.

Heaven alone knows what will happen when it reaches the village.

Most people fear the obvious: pornography, graphic violence and other morally dubious fare. I think they’re missing the point. The really disruptive influences are the social ones.

What will happen to society when we chat more with people on other continents than the ones sitting right beside us?

What will happen to families when their members start to see what else they could belong to?

The societies where Internet runs deepest bear the least resemblance to the country we live in today.

The Vanuatu we know is about to change utterly. The only question now is: What do we want Vanuatu to become, and what are we willing to do – now, today – to achieve that?