Unless you're the deepest of deep geeks, you probably didn't catch the most recent meeting of SIGGCOM (Special Interest Group on Data Communication). That's unfortunate because a new initiative announced at the Philadelphia meeting may have some major implications for how you develop in the future.

Amongst all the other workshops and sessions about highly technical networking topics was an announcement of a new NSF initiative called GENI or the Global Environment for Networking Investigations. Ostensibly designed to "explore new networking capabilities that will advance science and stimulate innovation and economic growth," the GENI project may end up transforming the Internet as we know it.

But change is good, right? At first glance the goals for GENI look pretty benign. They want to "create new core functionality," "develop enhanced capabilities," "deploy and validate new architectures," "build higher level service abstractions," "build new services and applications," and "develop new network architecture theories." All good stuff, right? For the most part I'd say yes, but a closer read reveals some disturbing changes that when fit into a larger trend of disturbing changes being foisted on the Web, start to get me worried.

In particular, what concerns me most is that one of the "enhanced capabilities" GENI is trying to develop is to build into the very architecture of the Internet the ability to "design for regional difference and local values." Who doesn't like "values," right?

Well, it may depend on who is defining those "local values." In the case of most democracies, it's (for the most part) the citizens who vote on those values. While countries such as the United Kingdom have recently made headlines for wanting to ban "violent porn" on their networks, the fact still remains that if citizens don't want the government to dictate what content they can access they can do something about it and change the laws.

On the other hand, in the many dictatorships and totalitarian regimes around the world, the Internet is seen as a threat to the chokehold the government has on its citizens and those citizens are given absolutely no say in what they can see and what they can't. In those countries the Internet is seen as a threat, and rightly so. Citizens with access are able to organize, communicate with dissidents around the world, and publish their struggles to a worldwide audience. Long before the invasion of Afghanistan, the RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) was letting the world know about the Taliban and its brutal oppression of the women of the country. The Web gave the voiceless a global voice and opened the eyes of many people to the repression they had to endure.

Of course, the governments doing the oppressing don't tend to like organizations like RAWA and regularly try to shut down its use of the Internet through countrywide filtering and monitoring systems. Countries such as China and Saudi Arabia regularly block their citizens' access to "objectionable" material which can often include news, political commentary and dissident Web sites.

Luckily, the Internet was originally designed for openness and trust and so isn't so easily controlled. John Gilmore once famously said that "the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," a fact that's luckily held up as those opposed to political repression and in favor of free speech have been able to use anonymizers and other "tricks" to get past the online repression of their governments. Because of the current structure of the Internet, no one country can ever hope to fully control what their citizens see.

Of course, this freedom does come with its own attendant problems, as anyone in charge of network security for their organization can attest to. The anonymity and openness of the 'Net has allowed criminals and outlaws to avoid the long arm of the law by hiding behind the same functionality that allows those resisting oppression to have a voice. Freedom has its price. And as the women of Afghanistan and those who've used the 'Net to fight for freedom will tell you, it's a price worth paying.

But what if the Internet changes? What if it becomes possible to control access to content at the infrastructure level? "What if," as Seth Finkelstein said in a retort to Gilmore's aphorism, "the censorship is in the router?" Up until now that really hasn't been the case. GAIN might change that and, by extension, might change the freedoms and anonymity that most know and love, even if sometimes while cringing at the consequences.

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