3. Policy and Law: Denial of Service Threat

On 1 January 2011, the social network ‘Facebook’, based on server computers and disk storage devices, connected via the global Internet claimed a population of over 500 million ‘active members’ with over 50% making use of the network each day. Moreover, each one of those members is claimed to have an average of 130 ‘friends’. Any denial of service to this structure is now seen by many members as being of major significance, if not, catastrophic. Even small periods of downtime, as reported on 30 December 2010 by The Australian newspaper, may cause concern and frustration for its users. The question could easily be asked as to whether or not the ‘citizens’ of that ‘Internet Nation’, e.g. ‘Facebook’, and other ‘social networks’, could see DoS to the NII as simply an act of denying access by a citizen to his or her ‘home country’, their ‘homeland’. Essentially these ‘Internet’ nations are operating largely outside the constraints of the geographic nation states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They are looking for ‘governance’ from a new, private sector ‘government’, often a privately or publicly held company based in one of the traditional nation states, e.g. ‘Facebook’. The ‘citizens’ of this new ‘State’ in cyberspace could even be seen as maintaining human relationships on levels similar to the more traditional situation, e.g. maintaining a hierarchy of associations with other ‘citizens’ of the ‘State’. [16].

SMS stands for ‘Short Message Service’. ‘Wikipedia’ explains SMS as “the text communication service component of phone, web or mobile communication systems, using standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices.” It forms part of the internationally accepted ‘Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM)’ standards set developed and agreed in the mid-1980s. An example is the ‘NetCode’ system of Australia’s Commonwealth Bank which is described by the bank as follows:

NetCode SMS is a free service available to all NetBank customers. It replaces Personalised Identification Questions to provide added security when completing certain NetBank transactions…Every time you perform one of these transactions, a new NetCode will be sent to your mobile phone via SMS. To complete your NetBank transaction, simply key in the 6-digit NetCode in the ‘Enter your NetCode’ field. Each NetCode number securely matches the Commonwealth Bank’s NetBank system. [6]

The term ICT stands for ‘Information and Communications Technology’. As such, it expresses the concepts of knowledge and process rather than the results of that knowledge, i.e. the artefacts or the products and systems that are created from ICT. As such, it is an expression of the knowledge and experience of humans.

The ‘tech-exclusive’ website, on 27 April 2010, reported as follows under the banner headline ‘India faces Disrupted Internet Service Due to Undersea Cable Issue’

Getting slow download speed? Well things will continue like this for the next 3 to 4 days. The slow internet speed is to be blamed on an undersea cable repair going on. The SEA-ME-WE4 undersea cable got cut a few weeks ago and is now being repaired. This cable links Europe, the Middle East and South Asia region. The worst hit country is India. This single cable carries around 89% of the traffic load of the above mentioned region. The major internet players – Bharti Airtel and Tata Communications – get their bandwidth from the same undersea cable. This is not the first time that an undersea cable cut has disrupted the internet speeds in India. In 2008, an undersea cable cut led to India losing around 50% to 60% of its internet bandwidth. [122]

A contributing author, Caelli, is the Chair of the SSAC for auDa, the Australian Domain Name Authority.

A contributing author, Caelli, has been a member of TC-11 since 1984.

The author, Caelli, was a foundation member of this group and served on it until Jan 2011.

The Internet Industry Association (IIA) is an industry organisation governed by its own constitution and by a board of directors. It maintains an operational executive group including a Chief Executive Officer based in Australia’s Federal Capital, Canberra. Its home page on the world wide web is at URL http://​www.​iia.​net.​au/​.