Pay attention to choke points before crisis hits

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Pay attention to choke points before crisis hits
By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist

What do major seaports, gas pipelines, the Windows operating system and your
local phone company have in common? They are just a few of the choke points
of the modern world.

Choke points are risky, to society and the economy. They'd be less of a
threat if we worked harder at preventing their formation in the first place,
and if we spent more time planning for their inevitable disruption.

Some choke points are natural, or at least difficult to avoid in the normal
course of affairs. Others are manufactured. All are dangerous when we ignore
their existence and risks until things go wrong.

The West Coast dock lockout, suspended under political pressure from
Washington, was the latest warning. In an increasingly global economy, it
showed the potential for chaos if one of the few major shipping corridors
were closed.

This is a just-in-time world. The container ships carrying an endless flow
in and out of our ports each year are part of a massive, moving warehouse
for manufacturers, supermarkets, toy stores and just about every physical
good. Close the doors of the warehouse, and the economy shudders, as we saw
when the lockout led New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., the Toyota-General
Motors joint venture, to shut down auto and truck production at its Fremont
manufacturing plant.

The world's oil moves in supertankers, and there aren't that many of these
mega-ships. Suspicions are growing that last Sunday's explosion on a French
oil tanker, which crippled the vessel, was sabotage or terrorism. The oil
markets were already nervous about the potential for a Middle Eastern war
that could shut down some of the world's most important oil fields. A
crippled oil-transport industry would, at least temporarily, make the dock
lockout look like a picnic.

California learned the hard way about energy choke points in late 2000 and
early 2001. Among the abuses of a poorly designed system of semi-regulation,
which invited unethical businesses to game a flawed marketplace, was a
natural-gas company's move to use its control of vital natural-gas pipelines
to starve supplies in order to hike prices. The state is trying to undo the
damage, but too many of the conditions that led to the trouble remain in
place.

The more virtual world of computing and communications is becoming more
burdened by choke points all the time. Everyone is aware of Microsoft's
monopoly in operating systems and, increasingly, other top software for
desktop computers. Most people aren't aware of the risk we run by using a
standard that has again and again been shown to be insecure and controlled
by a company that views ethics in the context of tactics, not basic
behavior.

Virus writers cause damage to the monocultural Windows ecosystem when they
send their anti-social code into the ether. Microsoft uses its control to
prevent innovation.

The regional phone companies, too, have been among the more anti-competitive
entities in recent years. These government-granted monopolies have had a
lock on local phone service for decades, and then took advantage of flawed
deregulation (sound familiar?) to stifle budding competition for data
services. Barring some changes in policy, they and another major local
monopoly -- cable-TV systems -- will be pretty much the only game in town
for high-speed data.

Why do governments, which should know better, tend to allow choke points to
emerge rather than do everything possible to eliminate them or at least
encourage bypasses? Incompetence is too simplistic an explanation, though
all organizations have their share of fools. Governments actually like choke
points, at least until they really squeeze the economy, because they're
easier to keep tabs on and control if necessary.

Government doesn't always do the wrong thing, of course. On Thursday, the
Federal Communications Commission, which has largely been a lapdog recently
for the companies it regulates, turned down the ill-considered merger of the
two dominant satellite-television services, Echostar's Dish Network and
Hughes' DirecTV. We could use more actions of this sort.

In a world where rationality prevailed, we'd launch a new kind of Manhattan
Project to remove the energy and communications choke points. We'd actively
discourage a software monoculture that leaves us so open to cyber-vandalism
and corporate power hunger. We'd work harder to establish more competition
for telecommunications, not let the industry consolidate to a tiny number of
players.

We don't live in such a world.

Sometimes there's value in learning the hard way. Humans respond to crisis,
though the higher the risks, the more danger in assuming we'll muddle our
way through our higher-stakes woes. And we emphatically don't want a
centrally planned economy.

But why do we allow ourselves to indulge in short-term indifference, poor
planning and lack of action when an obvious problem is taking shape?

When we do, we invite trouble, and we inevitably get it.

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