The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [105]
Problem number one: there was no such thing as a “national” computer. At all. That was a contradiction in terms, like talking about a black sun or a square triangle. You could put a flag decal on the side of a computer. You could hide it in a military base. You could pay for it with taxpayer money. But talking about “American” computation was like talking about “American” mathematics or “American” physics. It just didn’t come with flags.
National people were the wrong people to attempt that security job. A nation, any nation, was just too small. Any cable map could show you the enormous fiber-optic pipes that circled the planet. Tycom Transatlantic, Emergia, Americas-II, Africa ONE, Southern Cross, FLAG Europe-Asia. Pipes laid across the planet’s sea bottom at fantastic expense and effort. Specifically built to reach distant, extremely un-American places. Places like Santiago, Capetown, Mumbai, Perth, Shanghai, and Kuwait City. Places chock-full of alien computers owned by very un-American people.
The whole point of the effort was to become less American. That was why it was called Internet instead of USA-Net. It was possible to build nets inside your own nation that only your nation could use. France had tried it: Minitel. Britain had tried it: Prestel. National networks died horribly. It was like trying to build a computer net that only talked to Milwaukee.
It got worse. Even inside American national borders, you couldn’t wrap computers in the red-white-and-blue. Eighty-five percent of the hardware was owned by private industry. Multinational private industry.
Multinational private industry that had gone broke.
The computer and telecom industries were on their knees. They had lost legendary, incredible, colossal amounts of money. They had lost diamond-mine, mountain-of-gold heaps of money.
They had tried to build a commercial for-profit Internet. There was nothing commercial about the Internet any more than there was anything national. That was why it was called Internet instead of Internet Inc.©‰.
The Internet belonged to a world of the 1990s, a Digital Revolution. The people in the 2000s were way over the Digital Revolution. They were deeply involved in the Digital Terror. The nervous system of global governance, education, science, culture, and e-commerce, it was all in a spasm. It had all broken down in a sudden terrible panic in the last mile. The last mile stood between those great, big, fat, global, huge, empty, terrifying fiber-optic pipes, and the planet’s general population.
The Net had not just broken. It had been abandoned, cast aside in fear and dread. Because the movie companies, and the telephone companies, and the music companies had suddenly realized that their “intellectual property” would not remain their property for one pico-second, when everyday people all around the world could click, copy, and forward all their movies. All their music. All their calls home to Mom. And the people did that. The children of the Digital Revolution were a swarm of thieves. More people had used Napster than voted for the President of the United States. Nobody paid for that music.
People didn’t pay. The people were free. In a world like that, there wouldn’t be a music business. There wouldn’t be a movie business. There would be no such thing as long-distance charges. There would be no long distances. There would be no business. Nothing but it, the Net. And the horror of that freedom could not be endured.
So the Information Superhighway had just stopped. Stopped dead with its sawhorses and construction lights still up, like an incomplete overpass. A titanic physical investment. Dark fiber. Not lit up. In receivership. Gently rotting in the mellow ground.
Business could not save itself from the situation it had eagerly brought on itself, this world of free and open access. It could not spare the effort and revenue to reinvent itself as a safe, secure, comforting, for-profit utility. There was no such thing as a computer “business,” really. Racing into cyberspace was