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17 Jan 2009
1. Net Neutrality
Iain Thomson: Without doubt the biggest technological issue of the
coming administration will be net neutrality.
When the internet was created the idea of net neutrality was key; there had to be a level playing field that let every web site compete with every other. Adam Smith would have been proud of the internet's creators.
If you want a good example of why net neutrality is a good thing, think of Google. When the Google team came up with a much better search algorithm than engines like Yahoo, MSN and Altavista, they simply put it online and people found it for themselves. No costly advertising or marketing campaigns were needed. People flocked to Google because it was better. It was pure competition in action.
But if Microsoft, Yahoo and the other search providers had been able to buy faster access it is unlikely that Google would have been able to compete. The majority of consumers want fast searching above all else and, if the established online media giants had been able to buy that, they would have preserved their market position and stifled innovation.
But net neutrality is a problem for telecoms companies. They want to sell faster access, not just to the internet - which is perfectly acceptable - but to web sites so that they load faster. This would be a great money spinner, but very harmful to online development.
Competition relies on a level playing field for all, so that the best ideas succeed on their merits and not on the spending power of their creators. Net neutrality needs to be enshrined in law as soon as possible.
Shaun Nichols: I know I chided Iain earlier on regulatory controls, but this is one sort of regulation that Americans in both red and blue states could definitely be sold on.
When you get down to it, net neutrality is about preventing big businesses from gaining preferential treatment, and inherently putting any sort of emerging online business at a disadvantage. That's the sort of market regulation that you can sell to both sides of the political aisle.
Although I'm sure certain companies will toss all of their lobbying might to fight it, ensuring net neutrality should be a no-brainer for just about every government on the planet.
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Surely Number 1 Should be Avoiding Security Risk and Data Loss
With the the inauguration of Barack Obama as President, more than 3,300 staff in and around the White House will see their existing employment contracts come to an end. With a new generation of staff joining the ranks, being rehired and redeployed, the process creates a massive IT and data security project. For the central legislature and the various government departments the task ahead is to ensure that access to IT systems and sensitive data is withdrawn from outgoing staff and enabled for incoming staff. The staff changes in Washington DC mirror the staff upheaval that could take place here following the next British election, with MPs losing and gaining seats while civil servants, advisors and contractors face redeployment and replacement by a new government. As illustrated by data losses at HM Revenue and Customs and the Ministry of Defence, authorised IT users cause more damage than hackers, making employees and contractors with legitimate access to applications and databases by far the most serious threat to information security. According to a 2008 report by the US Secret Service and Carnegie Mellon University titled Insider Threat Study: Illicit Cyber Activity in the Government Sector, more than 85 percent of incidents were committed by staff with authorised access to IT systems, and 69 percent of the time access control gaps helped the insider abuse the system. Organisations need to prioritise access assurance to protect their data from internal vulnerabilities just as much as, if not more than, they focus on hacking or other external threats. Government in particular has a responsibility to its constituents to deploy technology that tracks the changes to employee access and helps ensure the security of sensitive data.
Posted by: Stuart Hodkinson, general manager UK for Courion 19 Jan 2009