SherWeb

Like any super-powerful information database that can connect billions of people anywhere from Kiribati to Bergen op Zoom, wait… the Internet IS the only super-powerful information database that can do that!

The Internet is woven so tightly into our social-political-economic-geographic quilt, that the very thought of someone or something trying to hurt our baby makes us rage, sweat and panic like Doomsday has arrived.

Here is how Internet panics have evolved over the course of time and where they are headed…

“It’s So Powerful! It Can Survive A Nuclear Attack”

Emerging out of World War II and treading right into the Cold War, the U.S. Department of Defense needed a communications network that would be immune to a nuclear attack. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, it pushed President Dwight D. Eisenhower to form the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to keep up with the Russians in the space race. Several years later ARPA began to focus on computer networking and communications technology. ARPANET became a network of computers that would purportedly carry on communication with each other, even after a nuclear attack.

Though it is very doubtful the Internet would survive ANY sort of large-scale nuclear attack, the need to protect this precious hub of information marked the beginning of Internet scares.

“The Internet Will Suffer A Catastrophic Collapse”

Bob Metcalfe & Blender

Bob Metcalfe, father of Ethernet and founder of 3com, is perhaps best known for his 1995 InfoWorld column where he predicted that the Internet would “go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” So convinced that the Internet would overload to the point of collapse, he even promised to eat his words if it did not.

In 1997, when that prediction failed to come true, Metcalfe- in front of an audience of 2000 people at the Sixth WWW International Conference- took the column, put it in a blender, added some water, and proceeded to eat the pulpy mass with a spoon.

“Spam is Killing the Internet!”

Today, advanced anti-spam protection offered with a Hosted Exchange mailbox will repel most spam and malware threats. However, in the mid to late 90s spammers managed to hog search results pages through Black Hat SEO tactics so you would have to sift 5-10 pages in to find a relevant result to your query. Many speculated that the Internet would no longer be a useful resource due to all these spam sites.

“If you Type Google Into Google, You Will Break The Internet”

True? No. Hilarious?

Absolutely.

“Ahh! Y2K!”

January 1, 2000 aka the Millennium Bug created mass hysteria about potential problems that would arise for both digital and non-digital documentation as well as data storage. Because many computer programs stored years with only two decimal digits it was believed that systems would break down when the “…97, 98, 99, 00…” ascending numbering assumption suddenly became invalid.

Programs would not be able to distinguish between the year 2000 and the year 1900. Other programs would try to represent the year 2000 as 19100. John Hamre, the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense at the time claimed “The Y2K problem is the electronic equivalent of the El Niño and there will be nasty surprises around the globe.”

The United States Government passed the Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act, by working with private sector counterparts in order to ensure readiness, and by creating internal continuity of operations plans in the event of problems.

An estimated $308 billion was injected worldwide in preparation for the Y2K disaster. But many critics claimed that there were no, or very few, critical problems to begin with, and that any minor mistakes that did occur could have easily been fixed in a much more cost effective way. An editorial from the Wall Street Journal called Y2K an “end-of-the-world cult” and the “hoax of the century”.

“Brownouts! Brownouts! Cyberspace Is Filling Up!”

In 2007, Nemertes Research, a research advisory firm that specializes in assessing the business value of emerging technologies, predicted that Internet access capacity would become insufficient to handle demand by 2010.

Here is an excerpt from their press release:

“Voice and bandwidth-intensive applications such as streaming and interactive video, peer-to-peer file transfer and music downloads and file sharing are redefining the Internet. Nearly 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of online video in May and viewed more than 8.3 billion video streams, according to research by comScore. Additionally, wireless devices such as cell phones, Blackberrys and gaming accessories provide consumers ever-increasing access to the Internet, exponentially accelerating consumption of Internet bandwidth.”

Their findings indicated that by 2010, the Internet’s capacity would not be able to accommodate user demand resulting in Internet “brownouts” or interruptions. Videos from YouTube would take longer to download, applications we’re accustomed to using like Facebook or Gmail would run slower. They concluded that the overall impact of this inadequate infrastructure would primarily slow down the pace of innovation because the insufficient infrastructure would prevent new applications and web-based businesses from emerging.

Read the full press release here.

But could this all be a scare tactic to support metering?

The current issue at large, is that telephone companies want the ability to use deep packet searching to slow down certain users who are taking up more than their “fair share” of  bandwidth. They are pushing, rather successfully to increase prices for “net hogs” who use more than their share of capacity.

“We’ve Run Out of IP addresses!”

An IP address is the numerical label assigned to every device that connects to the Internet and allows those devices to communicate with other devices on the Internet .
Since the early 80s IP version 4 (IPv4) has been the most widely deployed standard – yet with the explosive rate of Internet users connecting through computers, tablets, gaming consoles and wireless devices, IPv4 addresses have seen their day.

Enter IPv6. It’s been around since the 90s but not many companies, ISPs, or other organizations have implemented it.

Some of the main concerns with the switch to IPv6 is that it will introduce a whole new set of applications and services that will be unusable to users on IPv4 networks.
An Infosec Island post highlights that:

“ IPv6 will also require a whole new rethink on how we plan to manage and address security in routers and switches. Most of the routers, switches and security appliances are not ready to make the jump or manage the transition. Some are too old, and others have never been updated to the new OS release. In the consumer space the situation is quite critical, just a few home routers are able to support IPv6 and most of ISPs are not even ready to provide support for it.”

Is there really a cause for concern? The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has developed an algorithm that will add an additional 26 letters to addresses, and add 3.8 undecillion new addresses.  (In the US- that’s a 1 followed by 36 zeros.) I think we should be good for a while.. Plus, Google has been supporting IPv6 since early 2008. Since then they have brought IPv6 support to YouTube and have been helping ISPs enable Google over IPv6 by default for their users.

On June 8, 2011 you can celebrate World IPv6 day.

“Who’s Going To Run The Internet??”

Image source: Inquisitr

Many have proclaimed that 2011 will be the year that the net neutrality issue explodes. It seems telecom companies are destined to destroy one of the Internet’s founding principles: net neutrality. With net neutrality, everybody’s website gets the same speed and quality. However, if certain broadband providers get their way, which some already are, (ahem… Comcast) there would be a restricted fast lane on the Internet for their partners and services and sites who pay them a huge fee. Likewise, users will only be able to access more bandwidth by paying more money. As these corporations continue to thin out the competition, end users will have fewer and fewer options available to them.

If you’re interested we have a post that details the ongoing battles of how the Net is run.

Last Thoughts Before The Internet Apocalypse…

In a day and age where if you’re not online, you don’t exist- it’s legitimate to fear the demise of the tool that keeps “alive”. The Internet has gone from being a networking system for scientists and academics to share information, to the place where we run our virtual lives, from work, shopping, paying bills, chatting with friends, educating and entertaining ourselves, to even finding love.