[governance] China's next-generation internet is a world-beater - tech - 10 March 2013 - New Scientist

[Peter H. Hellmonds]

Mike,

you post a link to an article without making a commentary as to whether you endorse the views expressed or not. What are your opinions on this?

Here are some of my preliminary observations and remarks, based on a quick reading of the article but not on a comprehensive study of the underlying paper. 

Key in this article, and perhaps one of the reasons why the West is hesitant about some of these advances would be this part sentence from the article:

"It is the basis for a system that monitors and controls traffic flow over the internet [...]."

While I know that telco operators need to monitor and control traffic in order to assure that there is no traffic congestion (especially on mobile networks), they do this without regard for the specific content (instead rather based on content classes or protocols), whereas if you combine monitoring and control with content filtering (as the article claims "to block malicious traffic as a whole"), then there is a not just remote possibility that this could be abused in a way contrary to the open and free Internet.

Add to this the notion of "China's advances in creating a next-generation internet that is on a national level", then you also add a certain level of fragmentation to the net that counters the end-to-end principle of the net. 

Finally, Source Address Validation Architecture (SAVA) could be abused by tracing and tracking of users which would make anonymous access to information or anonymous sharing and expression of information impossible. Right now, proxies and VPNs allow for such things but if a network of trusted computers maintains a database of computers and their IP addresses, then masking one's identity might become impossible, with all its consequences. 

Just my 2 cents on this.  

Peter

On 12.03.2013, at 15:48, "michael gurstein" <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729075.800-chinas-nextgeneration-internet-is-a-worldbeater.html
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