Opinion: Complex and critical infrastructure invites heavy-handed regulation.
I felt an odd chill up my spine when I read last weeks comments
from the U.S. Department of State on the subject of Internet
governance. "These systems and networks are subject to threats and
vulnerabilities from multiple sources and different geographic
locations; security requires a concerted preventive effort by all
stakeholders, appropriate to their roles. National action and
international collaboration across a range of legal, enforcement,
administrative and technical areas are required to build a global
culture of cybersecurity," read in part that
position
paper from the State Departments Bureau of Economic and Business
Affairs.
I fully agree with the general principles thereby declared, and also
with the need for international collaboration to those ends. At the
same time, though, I felt a
revived
concern about the
impact
on IT professionals that results from non-technical diplomats,
regulators and law enforcement agencies attempting to define
the rules by
which coders and content creators will play.
Two literary references came to mind. The first was non-fiction: In
Tracy Kidders 1981 narrative, "
The Soul
of a New Machine," he described the moral dilemma of a computer
engineer troubled by military applications of his work. "A dissenter,"
Kidder observed, "could indeed refuse to do work that might end up in
the hands of soldiers: that would mean, in effect, not being a computer
engineer."
Once a forum for unregulated expression and technical
experimentation, the versatile and general-purpose Net is likewise
being cast in a role as
critical
infrastructure for which
it was not really designed:
One has to wonder if Web developers will wind up being entrained, so to
speak, in the drafting of the Net, made responsible either in effect or
possibly in law for protecting something that cant effectively protect
itself.
That disquieting image -- what one might call the paramilitarization
of the Internets technologists -- echoes another literary source,
Robert Heinleins 65-year-old story "
The Roads Must
Roll." Considering that the story was written
before World War II -- let alone
9/11/01 -- its impressive to see how clearly Heinlein envisioned a
military-industrial fusion of transportation infrastructure.
The complexity and interdependency of Heinleins rolling roads,
compared to the simplicity of pavement, remind me of the difference
between the so-called "
Web
2.0" platform of cooperating code versus whats now becoming the
legacy Web of
decentralized,
content-neutral linkage and delivery. Plenty of governments have
had problems with the combination of the apparent
ungovernability of
the Web on the one hand, and the
perceived
U.S.
dominance of what few mechanisms of governance the Web has had at all. As the
Web becomes a more complex environment, and as ordinary citizens and
governments simultaneously become more dependent on its predictable
behavior, technologists will likely find themselves less free to
experiment -- and thus less free to innovate -- while also being held
to a higher standard of responsibility for what they create and how it
behaves.
As we embrace and explore new protocols and tools for building more
sophisticated Net-based applications, wed be naïve to think
that we can do so without considering the politics -- for that matter,
the geopolitics -- of what we create and of the environment that it
yields. One might almost call this the difference between a coder and a
software professional. We need to establish a more professional role in
public debate of Net governance, or risk becoming mere trolls in the
basement of the Web that runs the world.
Send your thoughts on software professionalism to
peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com
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