Web Security CEO Warns About Control Of Internet Falling Into Few Hands (cnbc.com)

The idea behind the internet was to make a massive, decentralized system that wasn't under control of anyone, but that is increasingly changing, according to Matthew Prince, CEO of web security company CloudFlare. His statements come at a time when Google and Facebook and other companies are increasingly building new products and services and locking in users to their respective walled gardens. From a CNBC report: "More and more of the internet is sitting behind fewer and fewer players, and there are benefits of that, but there are also real risks," said Matthew Prince, chief executive officer of web security company CloudFlare, in an interview with CNBC. His comments came at CloudFlare's Internet Summit -- a conference featuring tech executives and government security experts -- on Tuesday in San Francisco. "If everything sits behind Facebook and you can't publish pictures like that, is the world a better place? Probably not," said Prince. "Before you know it, you could wake up and find more of the internet sits behind a small number of gate-keepers," said Prince. Putting that sort of power in the hands of a small number of people and companies "might not be the best thing," he said. Still, the wave of consolidation among the major internet companies is likely to continue, at least for now, he said.

Comments

A good thing.

[BarbaraHudson]

They use Facebook as an example. If we can get all Facebook users to voluntarily wall themselves off from the rest of the Internet, it's a win-win situation. They're happy, we're happy.

Re:A good thing.

[ShaunC]

Cloud places have their use, but there is always the security question, and there is always the grave concern about data sitting on a remote site where you have zero physical control over it.

There's also the outage question. Microsoft's Azure has had two significant outages in the last 10 days. Companies using Google's Apps For Work suffered a 7+ hour outage of Gmail this week during (US) business hours. When your enterprise is built on one of these services, what do you do when it goes down? You wait. That's all you can do, sit there and wait and hope the services come back up soon. Sure, you'll get a credit against your SLA after the fact, but that doesn't offset the fact that your ability to conduct business was down for hours on end and there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.

At least when you're running services on premise, you have some control over the situation. You can investigate and resolve the problem yourself. Getting your company's service restored is the #1 priority, not priority #1852 among 5,000 other companies all suffering through the cloud outage.

Too late

[ColdWetDog]

We've already lost that fight in terms of a truly decentralized Internet. The various governments and large corporations already are fighting to stake out various levels of control. The companies that operate the core infrastructure also have an outsized level of control.

I think the idea of a communication system that relied on numerous small autonomous nodes was a great one, but unless we can make some sort of giant mesh network, it will never happen. Even a big mesh is likely to get controlled by governments in one way or another.