Fergus Cassidy

Reality bytes

REVIEW OF THE YEAR 2002 was the year that 'real life' began to impact on the internet. In the real world there are no more gazillion dollar valuations on technology start-ups or web sites. The dabbling in new economic theories based on network technology were fiction.

And yet it was those glory days of unbridled passion and economic exuberance which thrust the internet into our everyday lives. Whether is was email or web surfing, the internet has been by far and away the most well-known and talked about technology since the invention of the telephone.

If 2001 was the year the music died as far as the commercialisation of the net was concerned, then 2002 was Year One of the Age of Reality. Investment dried up to a trickle and Return on Investment (ROI) became the well-patrolled bottom line. As far as economics was concerned, the same rules applied to new technology and the internet as had always applied: if there's no return, there's no investment.

While the end of 2001 saw a turning away from the internet as a harbinger of new economic rules, 2002 witnessed how the horrific events of 11 September continued to impact. Fuelled by speculation that the internet had allowed terrorists to communicate and organise, there were also heightened fears that governments were vulnerable to cyber attacks. At a US Congressional testimony it was said that "while bin Laden may have his finger on the trigger, his grandson might have his finger on the mouse".

And so the US government proceeded with various attempts to not only secure the internet (whatever that means) but also to serious upgrade its ability to gather and analyse intelligence. Those moves, culminating in an attempt to consider some sort of Total Information Awareness, brought the inevitable clash with civil liberties activists. And the involvement of the law.

Above everything else that happened this past year, the question of laws and legality surrounding the internet became more prominent than ever before. If cyberspace was supposed to have its own culture and code, 2002 showed that it certainly didn't have its own legal system.

The final closure of Napster showed where real power lay. Those who believed that the record and movie business would shatter into smithereens because of the net got their answer from the entertainment industry which turned to the law.

The arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov on a visit to the US, was the first indication that the entertainment industry was on the counter offensive. Notwithstanding that Sklyarov was recently acquitted, the arrest and charge of copyright protection infringment sent a very clear message on the use of the law.

Copyright continues to be one of the most demanding issues surrounding the internet. Not only about who has rights to this or that, but also whether there should even be irrevocable copyrights on work and for how long should that be? A case of major importance goes to trial early in 2003 where a 20-year US copyright extension law will be challenged [1]. The end of 2002 also brought an attempt to deal with copyright in a different way. Creative Commons [2], with influential copyright advocate Larry Lessig on board, released a new form of licensing that builds on methods used in the Free Software movement.

From who owns what on the internet, the law also got involved in ruling on what can be written. The decision of an Australian court in December to allow a defamation case to go ahead in the area where an allegedly defamed person lived rather than where the material was published, was the biggest example yet that the net will continue to have difficulties in fitting in. It is now much easier (and far cheaper) to take down a web site than it is to prevent a newspaper or magazine from publishing.

Such increasing involvement by the law has led to inevitable friction with civil liberties and human rights. As the United States proceeded to create intelligence gathering systems, so too did its allies. The EU, for example, began exploring ways of retaining communication records for up to six years, in the name of combating terrorism.

The overall climate resulting from legal matters has also focussed attention on the governance of the internet itself. 2002 saw two of the most important internet organisations move away from direct election of their boards. Icann, minders of the domain name system, and Isoc, the umbrella group for the main technical standards body, both changed their constitutions and reverted to more top-down structures.

Icann's new direction will see more of the world's governments get involved in the nuts and bolts of how the internet runs - and therefore, to an extent, how it's governed. Governments in highly industrialised economies are beginning to look more closely at the influence and effects of the net on their own economies and legal systems. So far it looks as though the internet service providers will have a much larger role in any future government plans.

While all this has been happening this last year, there was another side to what was perceived as the continuing centralisation of the internet. It was a big year for wireless and in particular Wi-Fi. It was also a year when the radio spectrum was put under the microscope and the debate has started on where this resource goes from here. Discussions are also underway on how the existing internet protocols can be progressed without altering the unique one-to-one aspect of the network. In other words, how not to centralise the technology.

While the real world impacted on the net in 2002, not so in Ireland. The reason being that all other issues fade into the background because this country is still living in the dark ages in its attitude to broadband. Every institution and organisation with a role to play in enabling broadband appears to either wring their hands, sit on their hands or point the finger at others.

The issue only remains on the table because of the dogged work done by lobby group IrelandOffline [3]. This volunteer effort went from strength to strength this year, made all the tougher by propaganda attempts in the Autumn which decreed that there was was no demand for broadband. However, there was a small breakthrough of sorts when UTV Internet offered an off-peak flat rate service in September.

The great success story in Ireland continued to be the mobile phone, as the figures showed for the first time that there were more cellular devices than fixed land lines. With only around 50% of the population online from home, the mobile phone is the king of network technologies.

Toward the end of the year the telecoms regulator was replaced with a three-person commission, known as ComReg. While the government has charged ComReg to bring about a flat-rate internet service immediately, there doesn't appear to be any new legislation coming that would strengthen or increase regulatory powers.

Ireland stands at a crossroads and it is no exaggeration to say that it is akin to the one faced in the 1960s. Then, as now, this country was faced with a decision on where the economy was going and it opened its borders and joined the global economy. Without broadband, the question of remaining part of that global economy will be decided for Ireland by others.

It's make or break time and I wish that by this time next year Ireland becomes far less concerned with connectivity and far more concerned with its consequences.

Next week: a look ahead to 2003.

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LINKS
[1] More information on the US constitutional challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act LINK

[2] The Creative Commons licensing project. LINK

[3] IrelandOffline - Campaign for affordable, unmetered and broadband internet access in Ireland LINK