Category: Policy

China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.

However, there is nothing in this reporting that justifies how TechCrunch headlined its coverage:

I’ve heard this before, a million times, and I don’t buy it. As I recall, it’s what the telcos said back in the mid to late 1990s, when they noticed the Internet eating up their wired (before wireless data) network, and didn’t want to be consigned to being “dumb pipes.” They complained that it’s really, really hard to do the kind of high quality, low down time service required for phone calls, and that the Internet was getting a free ride on all that hard work they did to lay the pipes, routers, and QoS (quality of service) processes down that allowed the Web to blossom.

Now that we’re going from wired to wireless, these same folks don’t want “the open Web” to happen to them again all over again. If they have to compete in an open marketplace, with the best applications and services on neutral ground, well, they’ll just be consigned, once again, to a commodity service layer with low margins. That’s their greatest nightmare. It’s far better to have a monopoly position as a gatekeeper to all our bits: to decide who can compete, and take tolls all along the way.