The internet has
become a vital part of our infrastructure and it is, in many ways, as indispensable as traditional utilities like electricity, telephone service and
natural gas. It's as essential to our world today as highways, water mains, and
sewers.
We don't, as a rule, build
important infrastructure without considerable planning, policy and debate - but
none of that happened with the internet.
Unlike our utilities,
or our physical infrastructure components like highways and sewer systems, the
internet, in effect, came in the back door as an overlay on top of existing
communications infrastructure. In doing so, it by-passed traditional planning
processes.
Many nations today are
now developing and implementing national digital strategies that they hope will
shape the future of the internet for the benefit of their nations and citizens.
Australia, France,
Germany, Great Britain and New Zealand are among the countries that have
already released digital strategies. Indeed, New Zealand released the second version of its strategy back in
2008. There've been discussions in Canada amongst various groups comprised of
government, public agencies and the private sector, but we're still far from formulating
a national digital strategy of our own that protects and promotes our nation
and its people in the digital age.
The scope of the
national digital strategies developed abroad is quite extensive. What's generally
not included, though, is a broader look at digital infrastructure and common
services. Like many countries, we've
become dependent on a lot of services over which we have little or no national
control. However, just because we can't control them doesn't mean that others
can't. Often, unbeknownst to us, our
digital activities expose us to powerful foreign legislation like the USA
PATRIOT Act and its far-reaching powers.
In the physical world,
when we cross the border into another country, we understand - or should
understand - that we are now subject to the laws of that country. What many may
not realize, though, is that our digital transactions and data cross borders
with great frequency - and we're often not even aware of it.
It is often very
difficult or impossible to determine whether our digital activities are wholly
contained within Canada or not. It might seem natural to conclude that a
transaction between a Canadian consumer and a Canadian company, or between two
Canadian companies, might be wholly under the jurisdiction - and protection -
of Canadian law, but is that true? What
if the website is hosted on a server located in the U.S.? What if payment is made through
American-owned PayPal? Even a seemingly insignificant detail such as an e-mail
confirmation of a transaction that is sent to a Gmail or Hotmail account takes
the transaction information through foreign-owned servers and, likely, into the
U.S. or elsewhere beyond our borders.
Most online Canadians
use foreign-owned services including Google, YouTube, Skype, MSN Messenger,
Twitter and Facebook to name but a few. And while we may occasionally consider
whether we want these companies collecting data about what we say and do
online, we seldom, if ever, consider the broader implications of that data
collection. Collectively, it paints a detailed picture of individual Canadians
- and when that data resides beyond our borders, it is also largely beyond our
control and potentially subject to intrusive foreign laws.
Increasingly, too,
Canadian companies are building services on scalable cloud-computing platforms offered by
foreign-controlled companies including IBM, Microsoft and Amazon and these are usually also hosted
beyond our borders. Many companies also use online software services provided
by third parties and have no idea where their data actually resides.
We're effectively outsourcing much of the digital infrastructure of our online social and economic world and, when you do that, you can lose control. While we can control some of what happens within our borders - for example, Canadian privacy laws did cause Facebook to change how it operates in Canada - we can't control what occurs beyond our borders.
There's an economic impact to using foreign-owned services, too. Money flows out of the Canadian economy when we do this. Genesis may have been "Selling England by the Pound" but we're selling Canada bit by bit.
This isn't a plea for
regulatory intervention. However, as
part of our national digital strategy, we do need to consider our digital
sovereignty. Educating consumers and companies of the risks associated with the
data that transcends our borders should be an important consideration. The responsibility for the privacy and
security of our data for government, the private sector and individuals, can't
be ignored. We need to ensure that adequate infrastructure services that are wholly
contained within our Canadian digital borders are available. Only by doing this can we ensure our security, autonomy and sovereignty in a digital world, and keep our dollars working in our domestic economy.
[Update: The Mark published a condensed version of this on February 26, 2010 at http://themarknews.com/articles/1019-our-endangered-digital-sovereignty]