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5 J. Cyber Pol'y 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/jnlocybrpy5 and id is 1 raw text is: JOURNAL OF CYBER POLICY Routledge 2020, VOL. 5, NO. 1, 1-4 https://doi.org/10.1080/23738871.2020.1748080 Taylor & Francis Group Editorial Introduction 'Since destruction of a small number of nodes in a de-centralized network can destroy com- munications, the properties, problems and hopes of building distributed communications networks are of paramount interest' Paul Baran, §: 1, 1964, RAND Paul Baran was a man with a vision. A researcher at RAND during the height of the Cold War, he described in a seminal series of papers a way of creating a communications network that was capable of surviving enemy attacks. Although Baran never obtained the funding to turn his theories into practice, his papers On Distributed Communications set out key concepts that were later reflected in the internet's foundational protocols invented by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. Those protocols enabled the rapid growth of a dis- tributed network of private networks, over which no one exercised control, and delivered a reliable system built of heterogeneous and unreliable parts. Cerf and Kahn went on to found the Internet Society. Despite the introduction of massive technological and commercial changes in the past 20 years, and despite the emergence of a handful of tech giants, the internet's architecture continued to retain its unique qualities. However, in recent years, it has become apparent that the internet's architecture is also experiencing consolidation. No matter where you look, whatever layer you examine, the same names keep popping up: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft. We are familiar with their applications, but increasingly the same companies are operating deep down in the infrastructure - resolving domain name queries, providing application programming interfaces, cloud hosting or computation. Volume 5, No 1 of the Journal of Cyber Policy is a special issue on the Consolidation of the Internet. It is a collaboration between Chatham House and the Internet Society, whose 2019 paper 'Consolidation in the Internet Economy' called for deeper research to help understand the phenomenon. What comes across in the articles is that we are close to the point where the internet starts to lose its defining characteristics. Paul Baran's early experiments showed that decentralized networks retain their resiliency even when mul- tiple nodes are disabled. Once they pass a certain point, however, the network can fail dra- matically. If we want to avoid this happening to the internet, we need to take more interest and collective responsibility for ensuring that we push back against harmful consolidation trends. There is an urgent need for transparent governance and effective checks and bal- ances, particularly of those firms which enjoy significant power over the network. This open access special issue begins with a guest editorial by Andrew Sullivan, the Internet Society's President and Chief Executive Officer. The first article by security researchers Dan Geer and Eireann Leverett with Eric Jardine of Virginia Tech considers the consequences of market concentration on cybersecurity risk. Jari Arkko, former Chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force, offers a practitioner's point of view on the risks that the increasing centralization of the network presents. Roxana Radu of Oxford © 2020 Chatham House. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http//creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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