In 2006, the future was postponed

After years of growing budget and trade deficits, the US dollar crashed in February 2006, as the Chinese Yuan was released from its linkage to the dollar, and the APFTA meeting of Asian countries announced they would no longer support the dollar with buying US treasury bonds. Within a matter of one week, the dollar lost 35% of its value, suddenly trading at 0.53 Euros. The result was more dramatic than expected, leading to a global recession that would last four years.

The recession increased the already strong trend of weakening social ties, and the urbanization led to a stronger concentration around the major cities. These trends were reinforcing each other, and together with the increased scarcity of resources also boosted poverty around the rapidly growing cities. The poverty and disillusion the seemingly downward spiral of the world led to, increased class segregation and terrorism. The terrorism was mainly directed toward the US, as the country was perceived as the reason for the situation the world was in. E-terrorism, for years a fear that hadn’t really been realized, showed its terrifying potential when the New York Stock Exchange was hit in September 2009. A virus that infected the internal network through a connected network from one of the major trading houses took out the entire trading platform. The loss of data and lost income from trades for more than one week led to damages estimated to about $13.3 billion. Before the US Government had recovered from the attack, the Federal Reserve was hit by a similar attack only four months later. The viruses in the two instances were traced back to Germany and Romania, respectively.

Due to the fear of further such attacks, the US President Rudolph Giuliani initiated measures to protect US companies and organizations from traffic originating outside the US. This was done by only allowing traffic that was monitored by the US Government. This monitoring was done by forcing all users wanting to access US Internet servers to download a small program called USecure, an enhanced VPN client that created a tunnel from the user to the US sentry servers. However, rumors abounded that the program not only worked as a normal EVPN client, it also monitored the computer and allowed the CIA to take control over it.

The rumors created resentment among Internet users from the rest of the world, and China, having emerged as the new global economic engine in 2010, protested together with the European Union against the US attempts to control Internet traffic. From fear of losing business, US companies realized that they would have to be accessible to the rest of the world, and many set up mirror Internet sites on European and Asian servers, transferring more responsibility to their global subsidiaries.

This gap between the US and the rest of the world was further widened by another set of rumors, claiming that leading hardware and software vendors such as Dell, IBM, Motorola, Microsoft and Oracle worked together with the US government to screen potential hazards to the US on users’ computers. The claims were brought to the attention of the UN in a speech by the Russian delegate, leading to a heated debate in which the US delegate denied any allegations as ridiculous. Nonetheless, the claims further propelled the European and Asian focus on open source software, used on computers mainly produced in China by vendors such as Lenovo and Bird. The technology divide was most evident in the focus on security. Users were forced to use a combination of fingerprint and voice-recognition password control to be allowed to enter US sites, and users from the US had to go via proxy servers that monitored all traffic to non-US servers, scanning data streams for viruses and malicious code. The process put restraints on the bandwidth of the users, thus dis-encouraging them from visiting these sites. Non-US users also used fingerprint passwords, but there was no central voice-recognition password control needed to access non-US sites.

These incidents also had a strong impact on globalization. Rather than highly skilled workers from developing countries going to the US, they now sought primarily to Europe and then to China or Japan. Suspicion from US citizens and scrutinizing and frequent security checks were cited as the main reasons for the change in globalization, together with China’s continued liberalization and increasing prosperity, salary levels and living standards. In 2015, we face an Internet that is no longer one Internet. The divide between the US and the rest of the world has in fact made two separate Internets, where the US has put security measures into the protocols, relying on technologies such as viral and radio-shot networks for internal speed. The non-US world has continued to rely on the standards from before the recession, with increased speeds as the main difference.

The future that was expected back in 2005 was postponed in 2006.