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Tuesday, September 3, 2002

Is the FCC prolonging the telecom slump?

John Judis makes the case in the New Republic. He argues that under current Chairman Michael Powell, the commission is trying to replace the freewheeling, innovation-rich Wild West that emerged after the breakup of AT&T with a series of information duopolies (typically, one phone company and one cable company in a given area):

If you want an analogy for what Powell is trying to do, you have to look at the Bell system before the breakup of AT&T in 1982 or to the French telecommunication monopoly in the '90s. AT&T was broken up partly because its monopoly was stunting innovation and removing competition. Long-distance prices fell 40 percent in the decade after AT&T's breakup. Similarly, French Telecom once boasted about its Minitel network, which since 1981 provided text-based, monochrome information services. But by the mid-'90s its monopoly held back the introduction of the Internet, a far better medium for conveying information. The U.S. telecom industry could eventually suffer similar obsolescence under Powell's plans for new consolidated regional monopolies.

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Firewalls as a security risk

In Firewall Follies, Simson Garfinkel says firewalls are disasters waiting to happen, in large part because they do nothing to protect an enterprise's information assets from inside attacks:

Organizations that rely on their firewalls build networks with hard, crunchy outsides but soft, creamy insides.

Worse, he writes, they degrade over time:

Here's what typically happens: Somebody inside an organization needs to send some sort of information through the firewall -- perhaps because the company is involved in a joint project with another firm. To allow this transfer, a supposedly temporary hole is opened in the firewall. But that hole invariably remains in place long after it is no longer needed. After a few years, the typical firewall comes to resemble Swiss cheese.

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