Internet

As the threat of a cyber war with the Chinese becomes more imminent, it's fascinating to consider how much the early stage of this cyber war actually resembles the Cold War of the nuclear age.

What is currently planned at Alibaba, Tencent, Sina, and Baidu worth an additional paper. My duty is to continue the story published last year and called “Chinese Internet industry ready to grow beyond borders”.

DARPA – the government organization that brought you the Internet – is back, this time with an audacious five-year, $110 million research initiative to militarize cyberspace. Called Plan X, DARPA's plan reflects a disturbing tendency these days – the willingness of governments – including your very own U.S. government - to weaponize and militarize the Internet.

The size of the Internet just expanded exponentially on June 6, a date also known as World IPv6 Launch Day. Internet Service Providers and leading Internet companies like Facebook and Google are migrating to a new, parallel Internet that supports 340 trillion trillion trillion (yes, that's 2^128) Internet addresses – exponentially more than the current number of 4.3 billion (2^32) IP addresses. As John Curran, president of the American Registry of Internet Numbers, pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, the easiest way to visualize this staggering number is 340 trillion universes, each with a trillion networks, and each of those networks having a trillion devices hooked up to them. If, before, we were running out of IP addresses, exactly the opposite is true: we now have an Abundance.

On the Internet, we’ve reached a tipping point where more than 50% of all Internet traffic is no longer generated by humans – instead, it's generated by a motley mix of search engine spiders, bots, scrapers, scammers, hackers and, yes, spies. We are no longer talking about the Internet, we are talking about the Bot Net – a “bot-mediated reality” where algorithms and bots influence where we go, how long we spend there and with whom we communicate. 

There is only one measure of time that matters to the current Internet generation: the here and now. The Cult of Now is influencing everything that we do and every interaction we have on the Internet, especially since providing a live, real-time update is often no more difficult than pressing a button on a smart phone.