This is getting interesting. The Net, home of The Next Big Thing and casually clad, overnight millionaires, is in a bit of a funk.
Seems there’s an evolving class of digital wise guys out there-pranksters and social misfits-who get as jazzed about crashing Web sites as Net entrepreneurs get about floating IPOs on Wall Street.
The Digerati, the elite crowd of Silicon Valley, Austin, Seattle, Dulles (Va.) and elsewhere, believe this digital playground we call the Net is their exclusive domain. Same goes for Wall Street, which has rushed to invest in dot-coms with a fervor matched only by the Republicans’ early embrace of George W.
Likewise, the wireless industry has jumped headlong into e-commerce.
Now, the GOP establishment and Digerati are sitting around stupefied, wringing their hands, dumbfounded by the unrehearsed entry of irreverent party-crashers in the form of John McCain and cyber hackers, respectively.
While the insurgent campaign of the maverick Arizona lawmaker has stunned many in this two-party system of high-priced coronations, the bubble-bursting revelation that the Net is not invincible should not come as a surprise to anyone.
The Net, technically and philosophically, is built on a fundamentalist libertarian foundation of openness-one free of government controls. Security was not part of the equation when the idea of scientific exchanges over a computer network was conceived a few decades back by, guess who, the government.
Times have changed. Today the Net, to the joy of many, has been co-opted by commercial interests.
Billionaire Net executives, appalled that cyber hackers would dare get some yuks at their expense, joined Clinton administration officials last week to brainstorm a response to domestic cyber warfare.
But all this makes the Digerati a little nervous. Sure, Net execs want protection from these digital molotov cocktails. But at what price?
The Net is unregulated, and the Digerati want to keep it that way. But being that the Net has become a fertile frontier for hackers, fraudsters and legit dot-coms alike, pressure will only increase for the government to address security, privacy, consumer deception, taxation and other issues-similar and dissimilar-to those in the brick-and-mortar world.
No doubt there will be attempts in Congress this year to stiffen penalties for cyber criminals. But such legislation could backfire. Can you imagine the kind of proprietary cyber information that would become public during a trial?
All in all, it’s one hack of a problem.
