Who Will Rule The Information Highways ?

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A great new tussel across platforms and continents are taking shape as corporate entities and nations vie for control of the information highway. One end it is Apple vs Microsoft vs BlackBerry vs Google vs NewsCorp vs Guardian. On the other side it is Google vs China, BlackBerry vs India and UAE, Germany,Greece and EU vs the financial press...the list is endless. Besides cyber security has also started to be a concern for nations, their arms suppliers as well as business organisations.


David’s hotnews slingshot

The most interesting duel that is happening in the cyber space is an encounter between David and Goliaths. The skirmishes between the mighty Investment Banks and the 30 employee media start up the Theflyonthewall.com shows that cyber wars will not be restricted to the strong and mighty or played on a uniform battlefield.



In March this year the tiny financial news service reporting hot news, theflyonthewall.com with a subscription base of 3000 and a monthly turnover of $150,000 was restricted by the Ney York District Court to delay the release of Bank analytics by 2 hours after opening of trading, so that a Bank’s clients got the first use opportunity of its recommendations.

Four large investment Banks Barclays Plc, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley had petitioned against the use of Bank releases in the public domain by the miniscule internet news service claiming that “this is a bread-and-butter case of hot-news appropriation” and was an infringement of copyright laws by free-riders who stole and distributed information on the internet. The Banks had asked for a lock in period of hot news by 4 hours but were happy to have got a 2 hour lead time instead. Their euphoria was however short lived, as was their strategy to target the smallest player in the market and win a easy legal court order to stop all such free riding internet news providers. On June 22nd Google the big daddy of free internet news distribution stepped into the fray and asked the federal appeals court to overturn the judgment. It was supported by Twitter the popular micro blogging site with just under 200 million followers. So the proxy war which the Banks fought with the tiny internet publication became full blown media battle where Google and Twitter will fight the Wall Street.

Google China faceoff

Google has been at the heart of most of the cyber controversies as it strives to keep its dominant position in controlling the information highway. In January it found Chinese hackers, break into its Gmail services and take away meta data including the passwords and IP addresses of several dissenters. This started a virtual war of words between Google and China that led to the withdrawal of Google from mainland China routing its services through its Hong Kong servers instead. It was only during the renewal of ISP licence in June that Google ultimately balked and removed the routing through Hong Kong and agreed to China’s terms and conditions.

Murdoch shuts the door

Apart from the China confrontation, Google was also at the heart of the controversy with publishing houses and media barons. Its model of free information availability on the internet has been hurting those who have been earning from selling information for decades. Established publishers had been up and about as Google declared a few years back that it wanted to digitize all books and make them available for free-reading. Soon after media barons managing big newspaper chains accused Google of easy free-riding its news services and earning more money from the distribution of news through its ad words programme than they earned from creating news. Rupert Murdoch had the support of rival search engine Bing of Microsoft, when he decided to close doors on Google free search and start the paid subscription service of Times and Sunday Times. Though most analysts have predicted failure of the paywall Murdoch will try all the options and perhaps carry on resolutely with the experiment.


BlackBerry’s double standards make it a soft target

In the mobile segment however it was the BlackBerry encryption services that hogged the maximum limelight due to controversies. The smartphone major which holds 20% of the market share has differing standards of security in different nations. The company has a 256 bit encryption relay with an unique pin number that encrypts messages that cannot be decoded by security agencies while transferring it from servers located in Canada, US and Britain. Other than the nations who host the servers, China and Russia have uninterrupted access to the encryption codes and server data. This has miffed of several large users including France, India, the EU countries and the Gulf nations, as they have no control over messages sent by BlackBerry servers. Whereas the EU nations have barred its officials from using BlackBerry, the other nations are considering options of banning the messaging service which UAE has already announced it would do.

Whereas RIM bosses are alienating user nations by throwing roadblocks in the way of data monitoring by security agencies the user nations have been tapping into RIM data with the help of associated software which service providers are installing as essential updates. Already a US security firm has shown that data can be hacked directly from the BlackBerry servers using a software known as TXSBBSpy and many nations will use the hacking route if direct access to monitor is not given. If Google could not stop China from having its way, it is hardly likely hat BlackBerry will be able to stop UAE , Saudi Arabia, Lebanon or India from looking at data, it wants to access. It is better for it to follow the path of market leader Nokia and facilitate user nations in tracking data instead of risking concentrated attacks on its servers.

With 90 trillion e mails having crossed the global cyberspace in the year 2009 the security concerns and the fight to control will increase.
As attrition in the cyberspace increases, so will cybercrime and privacy violations, the snooping, tapping, phising and hacking. New features introduced by Google, Facebook or any other service provider like location tools or any other predictive analytics tool can be anytime turned on or hacked into giving vital info about users or their products.Cyber security will soon need the necessity of the development of custom channels for classified information and private lives .