Is Internet2 a modern day Trojan Horse?

Do you remember the Trojan Horse war tactic?

It’s pretty straightforward. You provide a gift to your ennemy who doesn’t suspect it’s a poisoned one to be rejected outright. As the gift is naively accepted, the deception can occur much more easily than if it had to come down to an all-encompassing war.

Have you ever wondered if such a Trojan Horse is being built, for use against the internet as we know it today?

Think about it.

The telco oligarchy is desperate to jack up the connectivity prices, slash the transfer allowances and basically monitor every user to the point where privacy is just a distant souvenir. Add many Fortune 500 transnationals who lust on the prospect on keeping over a billion daily net users captive to their products and services instead of opening up the commercial possibilities to everyone, therefore fostering unlimited competition — and you start to see what’s in store for us, internet users, in the not-so-distant future.

The current internet has done more to redistribute wealth than any other modern media because its expansion is driven by anyone adding their knowledge, intelligence and resources to the ever-expanding cloud that makes up the most complete information source (and commercial marketplace) that mankind has ever built.

In other words, the current internet is working so well that the biggest companies are feeling the heat from all sides — and they don’t like it, however positively their PR departments try to spin it for the general public.

For instance, do you think major US-based soap manufacturers like it when web users, of all walks of life, start buying African soap (which is much better for their health, anyway) instead of mindlessly purchasing “the ususal brands”? Of course not! It’s driving them mad and they’re desperate to find a way to shift people into a more tightly managed realm.

Nobody knows, for sure, what the world elite is doing to lure us into a more manageable network but it seems many observers believe Internet2, the much celebrated academic network, could be just that.

One has to read through the countless pages of documentation published by the Internet2 group to see just how conveniently vague their positions are. It’s also very hard to reconcile their approach of only providing faster networks to academic researchers while not openly sharing these alleged advances with everyone else — why keep the whole world at bay, like that?

Established in 1996, Internet2 is a US-based, not-for-profit, networking consortium.

This consortium comprises more than 200 US universities that cooperate with 70 leading corporations, 45 government agencies, labs and other institutions of higher learning. There are also 50 international partner organizations thrown into the mix, for good measure.

So the whole Internet2 consortium is akin to an elite club where participation is heavily regulated.

One could observe that while internet 1.0, the current network, resembles a modern-day democracy, the Internet2 consortium looks like a gated community. Perhaps at some point, Internet2 will allow for more digital settlers to establish their new home within their gated community (proverbially speaking, of course) but is that going to be a losing proposition for those who don’t control this heavily tariffed, closed and monitored place?

You see, a gated community is like a reverse-prison in the sense that it’s designed for outsiders to have a hard time getting in but in the end, it’s still a prison. Internet2 has all the traits of a gated community and that’s why joining it is risky business because while others can’t get in, your own freedom might someday be taken away from you because some Board of Trustees thinks you’re pushing the limits of the community a bit too far.

In this light, if the Internet2 consortium comes to be presented as a “general public alternative” to access the internet, it could be considered the ultimate Trojan Horse that’ll end up costing a lot more to us all, mere mortals using the web, while making way with the freedoms we currently enjoy, online.

At a time when oligopolistic telcos have kept from properly upgrading the current network infrastructure to slowly strangle the traffic flows to a crawl in order, among other things, to facilitate the upcoming switch to some other network (maybe Internet2) for the general public, it’s important to discuss these kinds of issues because there might never be another opportunity, in our short life, to recreate another internet as free, democratic and open as this one.

While many arguments put forward here are supported by leading industry observers, some of them remain speculative. This being said, web users should pressure telcos into investing more to upgrade the current network while lifting the unacceptable limitations that are being gradually implemented.

If we don’t protect our current internet infrastructure from Trojan Horses, who will?

Tags: internet2, internet 2.0, internet 1.0, current internet, networking, fast academic networks, universities, academia, industry, governements, us-based, trojan horse, limitations, oligarchy, telcos, democratic network, speculation, war tactics