VB2018 paper: Internet balkanization: why are we raising borders online?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, said “I hope we use the Net to cross barriers and connect cultures”. Yet increasingly we are seeing barriers being raised not only in the real world, but on the Internet as well.

The Great Firewall of China is widely known, but the Chinese goverment is far from alone in its desire for control. Indeed, this week it was revealed that Russia

plans a test

to disconnect itself from the Internet, routing all Russian internet traffic to government approved exchange points within the country. While this is only a test, Russian officials have

said

they aim for the share of domestic traffic being routed through foreign servers to decrease to just 5% by 2020. Many worry that this is the first step towards an effort to set up a mass censorship system akin to that seen in China.

Freedom of access to information is something

Ixia

researcher Stefan Tanase cares deeply about, and at VB2018 in Montreal he presented a thought-provoking

paper

on the current state of the Internet and the worrying tendency towards raising borders and restricting the flow of information. Stefan believes that, as an industry, we should be discussing the issue and fighting for the basic human rights of freedom of expression and unrestricted access to the Internet.

You can read Stefan’s paper in both

HTML

and

PDF

format. We have also uploaded the recording of his presentation to our

YouTube

channel.

The

Call for Papers

for VB2019 in London is currently open. Submit your abstract before 17 March for a chance to make it onto the programme of one of the most international threat intelligence conferences!