The Net games

These days, every small thing about the Net makes news. But there are some that make waves around the world. People in our country are used to small news items reporting theft of telephone cables in some corner of their city every other day. And a few thousand people suffer with their phones dead for some days. Restoration hardly makes news.

But a cut in SEA-ME-WE-3 submarine cable between Singapore and Jakarta has sent shock waves around the world.

When Netizens in at least 33 countries got the busy signal on 11 November, it was attributed initially to another such routine Net outage. But the culprit, it has now been deduced, is a cut in the cable, probably caused by an earthquake or a ship's anchor. Net outage has become common. Telecom companies have scrambled vast resources to identify and correct the Net-crippling cable cut. It also indicates the delicate nature of Net's backbone despite the billions of dollars of investments over the years.

The impact has been felt around the world. This has happened at a particularly inopportune time as the Net traffic has increased enormously. The uncertainty surrounding the US Presidential elections has added substantially to the Net traffic as the world checks the latest twists and turns from websites around the clock. And many are amused that the birth place of Internet, the USA has to resort to 19th century electoral practices involving paper ballets, 100-year mechanical voting machines etc to decide the fate of one of the candidates who claims to have played a key role in the birth of the Net itself.

Internet-based voting is the key to partly solve the problem related to the laborious hand counting of ballots.

So we have an Indian software company, based in Trivandrum, basking in the limelight for its claims to have developed a tamper-proof Web-based election voting software. In collaboration with a German University, the company has successfully completed some pilot projects and is ready to offer this service not only to the US but to Indian states too.

In France, a court has taken the first step towards defining the boundaries of Net and restricting it to geographical boundaries. In what is likely to be a controversial case, a French court has ordered Yahoo to bar access to Nazi memorabilia and propaganda contents within the boundaries of France, because these things are prohibited in the country. Yahoo!' French division has to ensure this even though netizens from France may be able to access such sites through servers in other countries. The French court ruling is the first such known attempt to define the boundaries of Net services.

Governments around the world have been grappling with ways to regulate the Net for some time now and many have given up. Many keep trying. The technology has found ways to get around many artificial restrictions placed on the netizens. One has to watch how the French attempt will make a difference to this hide and seek game between governments and technology.