The internet post-coronavirus

China plans to roll out a new internet to take the place of the one we currently know. It promises fluidity and a farewell to network congestion, assuring that this new internet will be up to the demands made of it with the arrival of driverless cars, holographic communication and a myriad of other innovations. The idea is that devices on the same network communicate directly between each other, without having to rely on intermediaries. In fact, according to the Financial Times, which recently published an article after coming into possession of a document and a presentation recently given by Huawei to the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union, an initial proposal is already on the table. 

Asian multinational Huawei has said that part of the technology necessary could undergo testing as early as next year, and a Digital in 2019 report stated that it could eventually be used by the 4.4 billion users currently in the world today. Or is it just a pipe dream? The experts think maybe so. "The 'new internet' they are proposing is still far from becoming a reality. They aren't even clear on the requirements and technologies that are going to support it," said Pere Tuset Peiró, Faculty of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications professor and director of the UOC's Master's Degree in Industry 4.0. Tuset Peiró said that sooner or later they will find the keys to its development, but it is a long way off: "Based on experience, it won't be a design from scratch, nor will there be a drastic transition from one to the other, because the business model the internet is based on (providers giving internet access and companies providing their services there) wouldn't be able to survive the shift."

How would it work?

For now, what is known about the proposal is that it seeks to replace the current system, in which each device transmits data by sending packets to an address, with infrastructure that is far less "unstable" and "lacking", in the words of Huawei, the proposal's leader. The technology being used has been around for over 40 years and is based on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and a system of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. According to Huawei, the problem is that today's networks are increasingly more separated and individualized, which makes any communication between them slower and complex. That is precisely what the new system aims to solve by using a technology that would allow all devices on the same network to communicate directly, without having to depend on a satellite or intermediary.

But there is a downside... It would not be totally open. Everything points to the new system requiring some type of authentication system to be able to work, which would involve data tracking. That means that if the technical difficulties in getting it up and running could been surmounted, it would open the door to the question of censorship, and countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden have expressed reservations. As Tuset Peiró said, "The internet is a network of networks, which means the whole concept of an internet that is a single network under the exclusive control of a government, a provider or a company doesn't exist, nor does it make sense. And it most probably never will."

Sergio de Juan-Creix, one of the Bachelor's Degree in Law's[ts1]  course professors and expert in digital law at the Croma Law Firm, explained that if the current system allows us to be identified by an IP address, with an authentication system it would be even easier. "Right now, to identify someone by their IP address you need a court order obliging the provider to reveal the person's identity. However, if internet access is through an authentication system, a much wider net could be cast," he said, stating that not just providers but also other agents could control our internet use, with all the risks to our privacy that this entails.

And that's not all, de Juan-Creix said: "Other fundamental rights such as freedom of expression or the right to information could be put in check". He went on to add that, although we come across the problem of authentication on many websites, platforms, and social media networks, "if it's used as an internet access key, it could also be used to restrict certain individuals' or media sources' access, which would obviously curtail or control the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and access to information, the basic pillars of pluralist democracy."

So then why propose it?

As Tuset Peiró and fellow UOC researcher from the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute's (IN3) Wireless Networks (WiNe) group, Xavier Vilajosana, point out, the internet originally had military applications dating way back to the 1970s. Its distributed architecture and ability to support multiple communication technologies were intended to guarantee its operation in case of nuclear attack during the Cold War and lent it two key advantages: scalability and robustness. Vilajosana explained: "On the one hand, its scalability has enabled it to support new services and the exponential growth of its traffic from the beginning. On the other hand, its robustness has allowed multiple services to operate on this network despite its being distributed and therefore not able to guarantee quality in the strictest sense."

These two factors are the foundation on which the internet has been able to grow as a commercial network from its very beginnings. And thanks to this foundation, broadband internet access has shown steady annual growth of 50% for the last 40 years. Tuset Peiró said:"[T]his means it has gone from 100 bytes of access per minute to 1 gigabyte per second. What's more, it's estimated that internet traffic has gone from 1 terabyte per month in the early '90s to 122,000 petabytes per month currently, which is 122,000,000 times what it was 30 years ago."

But a distributed design comes with its disadvantages as well, the most important of which is that it could limit future growth; as no single entity has absolute control over the network, guaranteeing service quality for applications beyond that of the network of the provider giving access is complicated. Tuset Peiró and Vilajosana say that this is one of the reasons why the main international standards organizations, which include telecommunications equipment manufacturers and service providers, are very keen to see what the best option would be for network scalability, especially in terms of the new real-time applications and services on the horizon.

Governments have their own various reasons for being interested in having control over the network, which is what may have pushed China to try to take the lead. As Tuset Peiró explained, "Firstly, service provision and equipment represent a significant volume of business for companies in the sector, and secondly, having control over the network and all the data circulating there allows a government to directly obtain information about its users and even filter access to certain content."