Cyberspace domination

-Zoran Milkovski

Description:

When the Internet rolled out in the early 1990 by the American scientists many professionals thought that it would just be another way of America to push its products and culture on the rest of the world. Today, 18 years after the initial appearance of the Internet America is still the most represented country on the web. The statistic below shows the top five countries by the number of registered hosts today.

Rank	Country	Internet Hosts
1	United States	115,311,958
2	Japan	9,260,117
3	Netherlands	3,137,203
4	Canada	2,993,982
5	United Kingdom	2,865,930

(Source: The World Fact Book, 2002)
Even though the most requested language on the web is English (31%), the Chinese follows with 16%, Spanish 9%, Japanese 7% and German and French 5%. If we however, see the current Internet usage by continent we will see that the Asian continent has the most internet users 37%, followed by Europe with 27% and 19% in the North America. We can infer from this that the balance of power can be changed in the cyberspace and smaller countries that are not as strong both economically or by size can be up to the same technological level and present formidable enemies in the cyberspace. Even though this is true, we can make an assumption that even though some advanced countries have already active military presence in the cyberspace, no one would actually turn to deliberately shutting down portions of the Internet in a case of cyberwar. The more probable scenario is that it will always be fought similarly to the cold war, by gathering intelligence and demonstrating technological superiority by managing to penetrate the opposing sides most valuable networks. However, cyberspace domination is a actually what would be a “victory” for some and defeat for another in the language of the “cold war” era.

Enablers:

1. Growth of information availability – The people that go on Internet is keeping on growing, the Jupiter Research predicts that by 2011 there will be an increase of 38% of people who regularly use Internet. This means that even if free individuals, organizations and government who are into the intelligence area gather information from secondary sites (like army cadets keeping blogs) there is a possibility to stumble onto valuable information.
2. Substitute physical presence need for cyberspace intelligence gathering - Even though conventional spies and spying techniques are not history, cyberspace intelligence gathering has become one of the most resourceful information gathering techniques. Cartwright’s statistics for 2007 say that there were 37.000 government and private breaches, 13.000 direct assaults on federal agencies and 80.000 networks attacks on the department of defense.
3. Evolution of technology towards online capabilities – anything can be connected.
4. Economic domination – E-business participates a great deal in some countries economies. In additon, 39% of fortune 500 companies suffered a security breach in 2003, and although many of those attacks are not part of a government or military organizations there is still the future threat of possible attacks on a countries economy.

Inhibitors:

1. Globalization in real world – The movement towards globalization and therefore increased stability and cooperation between countries.
2. Equal opportunities – Smaller countries that lack the economic, military and natural resources can still be formidable players in the cyberspace, therefore making it harder to be dominated by a single party.
3. Increasing in size - Means increasing complexity and therefore gets harder to control
4. Imposing the language barrier – Different countries use different languages, an implementation of networked systems used by some countries can be a significant setback in the intelligence gathering community and cyber war itself.
5. Digital Divide – People in third world countries (many of which terrorist states) are not online. The digital divide was further explained by Eisenstein;
   Cyber-discourse fashions an imaginary vision of an interconnected world that it is only part true. The phrase of World Wide Web images the world accurately as the baseball phrase of The World Series“, only US baseball teams compete (Eisenstein, quoted by Beynon and Dunkerley, 2000, p.212.

Paradigms:

Establishing cyberspace domination using Arithmetic.
Let’s form a consortium & take control!
1 + 1 = 2 or more; But, does it really?
A consortium is still one party; thus it
must collaborate with the rest!
So, 1 + 1 = 1 in the Internet!
So far…

Time:

1960’s = A Decade of Dreams
1970’s = The Decade of Connectivity
1980’s = The Decade of Interoperability
1990’s = The Decade of Interworkability
2000's = A formal definition yet to come

Web Links:

http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.php/Cultural_Imperialism_-_American_Domination_of_the_Internet
http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=38667