HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018407.jpg

the power-law dynamics Brian Arthur found in the most successful network arrangements. Getting it right is enough of a task. If we can manage that, what we build will run with unimpeachable legitimacy. Chosen, not forced.

A third principle is that our gates and protocols and webs ought to be open to others, but with each new link weighed, added to the scale of strategic balance with exacting care. An overarching, systemic view should inform us. Nations that want to use our cyber security systems, for instance, should join research cooperatives – and possibly shoulder as well some problems of global network health like the implementation of IPv6 or DNSSEC, or any of the future jointly secur standars that will emerge. They should even – here is where the leap comes – be required to cooperate on nuclear proliferation, cybercrime, or trade norms. The puzzle here is clear: How to use our strengths to address our dangers? While we can’t directly press our lead in cancer research to stop national flirtations with nuclear bombs or cyber crime, it’s probably true that a cost of weapons proliferation should be exclusion from life-giving technical and trade and other gated orders. Remember that feature of network systems now, how the cost of exclusion grows even faster than the benefits of inclusion? If the aim of any society in this connected age is to accelerate the compression of time for its citizens, than life outside the best gates for this will be a nearly fatal political cost. Do you really want to rely on French computers? Wear Indian bikinis? Do Iranians want to rely on Iranian cyber-security tools alone? It is ever-easier for citizens of nations sliced free from vital networks to feel what they don’t have.

The courage to leave some nations out of the order we’re constructing – and to cut others out – doesn’t come easily to us. Today we don’t really engage in a comprehensive, linked strategy. Iranian proliferation and Chinese finance and Saudi military support are, for all practical purposes, separated in our contemplation of the world. Hard Gatekeeping frames these together as a piece; it spots the topological string running between each and gives us a firm position from which to pull the threads we want. We will come to know, to pay, the costs of over-inclusion. But this also means that we must be concerned with the security and safety of others, on our network or on others. To attempt to achieve absolute American security, to do so at the expense of other nations – this will not only erode the credibility of any system we build. It will also make them fundamentally less effective. We are, after all, what we are conneted to.

Fourth, no nation should be permitted to force another inside of its own gates. India might develop a great search engine; they should not be allowed to force Bangladeshis to use it. China may develop clever trade channels to Europe; they should not drive their use with military pressure. This principle is the flip side of our own commitment not to compel others into American gatekept systems. It represents an important nod to sovereign power: Each nation decides on its own. If we’re intent on avoiding some of the chaos of the last major system change, which produced the Thirty Years War, we should learn its lessons. That fight fundamentally touched on one question: Who decides what happens inside a country? The specific problem of Europe 350 years ago was if each King could

175

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018407