NET LOSS, NET GAIN

Dick Pountain/14 October 2001/04:12/Idealog 87

The last time I brought politics into this column it provoked a fine hoo-ha from a handful of readers, but I'm afraid that's not going to stop me doing it again. The appalling events of September 11th simply demand mention. I'm constitutionally incapable of blithely penning my usual sort of column in the knowledge of what has happened, and what's more, my vanity as a journalist with a platform from which to comment is such that I can't ignore the only opportunity in my lifetime to write the words 'The End Of Civilization As We Know It' and have them be true. No political cause in the world could justify the slaughter of the occupants of those twin towers, and the enormity of the crime will permanently change the rules. In the long run it may regrettably achieve its perpetrators' negative aim, which was to undermine the liberal values of Western democracies. For many years now the far left has been living in a post-Vietnam fantasy world, pretending that the USA was a repressive, militaristic imperial power in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Now the USA may be forced to become exactly that, for the protection of its own citizens. Nothing is now impossible, from nuclear strikes to military occupation of the whole Middle East. What's more, the USA would have 'right' on its side - by which I mean effective, politicians' right, the reluctant choice of the lesser of two unavoidable evils, rather than any fragile philosophers' notion of right.

This is though a computer magazine, so I'd better bring this around to computing matters, which is hardly difficult since an event that changes everything must ergo change computing too. Some of the immediate consequences were highly instructive. Dennis Publishing (publisher of this magazine) has offices in mid-town New York, and while the events were unfolding on that surreal afternoon a first priority was to contact employees over there to find out if they were safe. The public telephone system failed completely (apparently Bell Atlantic's biggest local exchange was actually in the World Trade Center) but contact was rapidly established via email, which continued to work perfectly. In this sense the Internet admirably fulfilled its original design purpose, which was to provide a resilient communication network in the face of the most extreme disaster.

Nevertheless the backwash from Sept 11th is going to have profound effects on the net as a commercial medium, even if these are in fact just an amplification and acceleration of trends that were already visible following the popping of the dot.com bubble. The first and most obvious of these will be a redoubled emphasis on security (you'll find plenty of that in this month's Real World columns). Crackers and virus writers, who have been having something of a field-day recently, were 10 years ago regarded as at worst naughty schoolboys showing off, and even in some circles as hip, countercultural rebels. Now I wouldn't give you tuppence for their civil liberties - they will be identified as part of the terrorist threat on which war has been declared. Expect the full force of the intelligence services to be turned against them and truly draconian punishments. (Perhaps the NSA and CIA will set up a Virtual Foreign Legion and press them into service in it from their jail cells).

The fall-out from this security clamp-down will be felt everywhere. Already we've seen Gartner telling clients to drop Microsoft server products as fundamentally unsafe. Expect this to get worse rather than better, and expect the .NET initiative to flounder and fizzle - trying to base the world's electronic commerce on a set of technologies designed for openness and resilience rather than confidentiality has always been a shaky proposition, even if it is a technically very seductive one. Expect also renewed pressure for censorship and snooping on net content, and for the views of net libertarians to be roughly tossed aside this time round. Compulsory government access to encrypted data and even the old V-chip idea must now be back on the agenda, even if the Federal government has to legally enforce silicon manufacturers to build these facilities into all products.

Such a huge shake-up of the way the Internet is used might not be a bad thing eventually. The way the Web evolved during the 1990s was haphazard in the extreme, the result of a few lucky accidents rather than any grand design: the decision to allow civilians onto ARPANet, and the discovery by said civilians that HTML was a whole lot easier than the client/server nonsense the computer industry was plugging at the time (so easy in fact you could do it yourself). If that phase is now coming to an end then perhaps we should be seeing this as an opportunity to revamp the whole notion of the Web, by adding those vital features that were missed out of the original conception, most obviously some built-in payment and billing infrastructure. E-commerce has always been a bit of a con - as many smarting investors now know to their cost - because the medium it is carried out over was designed for giving things away rather than selling them. It's still easier to make money by heavy-breathing down a premium-rate voice line than via a Web site: does that not tell you anything? Wave after wave of fashionable fig leaves - banner ads, portals, B2B, content networking - have been quite unable to disguise the naked truth that Web content must in the end be paid for. Devoting as much effort to micropayment technology as has been applied to encryption might perhaps give the Web a future.