Given its engineering background, many positive contributions can be made by the engineering community in the broader ICT world to assist in addressing some of the broader internet issues, often addressed within the more limited telecoms environment.. Of course some of this is already happening; however much more work would be needed to strengthen the technical foundations of the internet. Just as an example, the type of issues that could be addressed by a broader ICT engineering foundation could include, for instance:

• providing strong encryption on all websites—2048 bit keys
• producing a list of compromised devices or code that has known vulnerabilities in it and work towards a mandated level of security
• assisting the ITU in driving certificate transparency efforts and obtaining the support of all the member countries on this issue
• developing encrypted SIP or VoIP that in general could be mandated across all providers

The above listed issues however, now all face the NSA and other spy agent’s requests demanding back door access and access to the various software codes. Lessons learned from the current spying fallout means that the industry will need to insist that this will have to be organised within strict regulatory environments.

Another example of where the broader ICT industry can assist in internet related issues is privacy. The greater the public concern about privacy, the greater the opportunity to do something positive to protect privacy on a bilateral or multilateral basis.

The industry would also be greatly assisted if taxes, tariffs and monopoly control of undersea and inter-country fibre transport networks were removed, in order to stimulate the construction of new fibre routes that do not pass through the United States.

Interestingly, while the current NSA developments have alerted countries who depend on the USA for their internet transport, this situation originated not just because the bulk of internet traffic came from the USA—or because organisations were forced to transit through this country—but more particularly due to the level of competition that exists in that country, which was achieved through market liberalisation. Many countries, especially the developing economies, had and many still have highly restrictive and regulated markets that resulted in very high telecoms charges. Because of that high level of international infrastructure competition in the USA it was generally cheaper to move telecoms traffic through the US rather than develop links that were independent of that country, or use international links from other countries.

This does not have to be the case but it would require significant pro-competitive regulatory changes in many of the countries involved. (I refer here to my comments above about the lack of industry transformation in the telecoms world).