Summer GSR (Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity)

Governments, firms, and citizen/users/customers are in 2019 again debating to what extent the ‘Internet’ is, and/or should be, a ‘global’ infrastructure for communication and commerce.

These debates recapitulate earlier discussions about the supposedly borderless digital world, the ‘end of geography and death of distance’, arrayed against phrases like “balkanization of the Internet” and even ’splinternet’.

It’s easy to dismiss these phrases as rhetorical extremes---cartoons of what has always been a mixed reality. The digital world never has floated freely, untethered from political and geographical boundaries; nor has it has ever been fully contained within the borders of a single country.

The real question is about the /trajectory/ and /velocity/ of the relationship between the internet and national boundaries. Is the Internet at present becoming /more/ nationalized? If so, how quickly? How decisively?

How people think about and answer that question has real consequences. It shapes thinking about supply chains; about infrastructure deployments; about security; about terms of digital trade; about technical standards;; and certainly about the impact of digital communications on political and economic policies on both global and national accounts.

At present, there is no disciplined way to measure the trajectory and velocity of the Internet's nationalization. Stories about techno-nationalism, great firewalls, and restrictions on 5G investments can easily lead to an impression that the Internet is rapidly heading toward greater nationalization, but these stories don't allow stakeholders to make comparisons over time---comparisons that could help guide policy and corporate strategy.

We want to bring a greater level of measurement and discipline to this debate. The idea is to create an “Internet Interoperability Index”---a set of proxy measures which, in aggregate, give a direction of change over time. 

Comparable models in different domains include Transparency International’s Corruption Index; the World Economic Forum’s Competitiveness Index; Freedom House Democracy Index. All of these indices are imperfect measures of somewhat ambiguous concepts. But by developing a uniform set of metrics that are ‘good enough’ to act as a decent proxy for corruption or transparency or democracy, they provide some degree of value in comparisons across time and across different actors. They discipline the conversation, to a degree, about whether a country is gaining in competitiveness or regressing; or whether democracy is gaining ground or losing it on a global level.

We aim to create an Internet Interoperability Index that would achieve the same objective. The hard work comes in conceptualizing good-enough proxy measures; seeking out good-enough data sources to operationalize those concepts; and demonstrating a plausible metric that can be used over time to generate comparisons and inform decision making.

Here's an example of a (highly imperfect) measure, just to illustrate the concept. What is the cost of internet service (US Dollars in megabits per second) per capita, or per capita weighted by GDP? If national borders had no relationship to the Internet's deployment, we would expect that number to be the same everywhere. The degree to which these numbers are dissimilar from one another---and the degree to which that dissimilarity shrinks and grows over time---is the sort of thing we might be going for.

We seek a 50% summer GSR (50% is negotiable) to help us develop this concept, construct metrics, and begin data collection and analysis. If successful this has the potential to become a longer term research project and GSR appointment.