Comment The internet has become smaller, the result of a rethinking of when and where to use the 'net's intended architecture. In the process it may also have further concentrated power in the hands of giant technology companies.

Given the ever-expanding content and resources available online, and proliferation of connected devices, the notion that the internet has shrunk is counter-intuitive. But shrunk it has – to the point at which some iPhones do not immediately connect to the open internet.

Those phones are iPhones running the latest version of Apple's iOS and the opt-in service called Private Relay. The iGiant bills Private Relay as a privacy enhancement because it obscures users' DNS lookups and IP addresses by funneling traffic over networks operated by Cloudflare, according to specs set by Apple.

That network is not the open, public internet as we know it, but effectively a private network connecting devices to content, which may be provided by Cloudflare systems. Apple and Cloudflare can run it as they please. Yes, VPNs do more or less the same thing. But VPNs don't have Apple nagging hundreds of millions of users to adopt them.

Mobile UK – the lobby group that represents that nation’s cellular network – recently asserted that Private Relay means operators lose sight of traffic carried on their own networks, and therefore "are no longer the internet service provider to Private Relay customers."

The i in iPhone stands, among other things, for "internet" – now Apple doesn't want those devices on the open internet? That's a very different state of affairs to the vision of the classical, decentralized internet architecture that saw functions more widely distributed among those participating in the network of networks that made the World Wide Web, the iPhone, and so many other things possible.

When this classical internetworking ruled, your request to access an online resource would pass through numerous independent nodes and networks – some dedicated to data transit – all employing the same standards. That architecture was designed to make the internet resilient, and to allow many players to participate in the carriage of traffic and operation of the functions required to move it around.

That open architecture remains in place, but now carries traffic for much less physical distance than was once the case. Now, most of the content you watch, read, or listen to is stored in a relatively nearby server, or in a server connected via private links, for fast access; your request for stuff typically doesn't need to go very far nor have to elbow its way through the open, public internet the whole way.

Most traffic thus spends a little time on a classical network run by your internet service provider, then perhaps travels over a transit provider's classical network. Before long it reaches on-ramps to networks that might for the first time properly be called "information superhighways" – remember that phrase? – because they exist to funnel massive amounts of traffic to and from either datacenters or Big Tech. Your data is often on the open, public internet for a few thousand metres.

It may not even escape your internet service provider's network; video-streaming giants, for instance, have been known to place servers filled with content in ISPs' networks so they can be rapidly accessed by broadband subscribers.

"People built CDNs to give a really optimized overlay to web content," explained Bruce Davie, Reg columnist, co-author of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach and the related series of books, a Cisco fellow, and a pioneer of MPLS and software-defined networking. "It is no longer a path from host to host. Now it is a path from browser to CDN, so we optimize for connection from CDN to humans."

Davie doesn't feel that change precludes innovation. In discussion with The Register, he cited blockchain-fueled ideas as a networked application that wasn't envisaged either by classical internetworking or Big Tech.

And he's not sure pushing for more standards are the answer. Across his career he's seen standards used by vendors to advance their own ideas. But he also feels that standards remain necessary, because they create an open environment in which new ideas can be tested out by all, not just the big players.

This shift hasn't altered the fundamentals of what happens when you request access to a resource connected to the internet: the likes of TCP/IP and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) remain essential. Standards probably run private networks too - although if their operators choose to use something else, that's their problem so long as the rest of us can eventually connect.

But what has changed is that the resources most people want to access online are either hosted by Big Tech, only accessible on networks controlled by Big Tech, or both.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.

"It is really hard to do high speed over long distances," Geoff Huston, chief scientist at Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC, the Asia Pacific's regional address registry), told The Register. "Protocols work best when the connection is tight."

Which means it's really hard for a video to stream reliably if you need to bounce through a dozen nodes to reach a server on the other side of the world.

Those who profit from content figured this out in the early 2000s and moved their assets into datacenters served by substantial internet connections, then replicated them around the world. Wherever users sought out content, it would be fetched from the nearest host, ideally. Those networks grew quickly. Big Tech built them fast, because only by controlling the network could they satisfy consumers and do things like reliably and swiftly inserting dynamically generated ads.

Private networks made this possible. So today, if the resource you seek uses a content delivery network – as is best practice – or is hosted by a Big Tech player, your request will pass through your ISP and quickly be routed to a point of presence that connects to Big Tech's private networks. Those points of presence often employ caches of content, to reduce latency and improve user experience.

Again, that change is not a bad thing. For several reasons, one being quality of service – a desirable feature for a multi–party video conference. Because if one or more participants are out of sync, or buffering, the experience is intolerable for all.

One reason video conferencing has boomed is that the likes of Zoom quickly move traffic away from networks controlled by carriers or ISPs, and onto the private networks they control. Use of those private networks is a huge reason that videoconferences have become ubiquitous: shrinking the internet means it is now possible to carry traffic with sufficient speed and reliability that the experience is mostly tolerable (Zoom etiquette and content are not dependent on networks).

All big tech players run such private networks, to move data to and from their server farms or clouds. The likes of Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, and Akamai rent content delivery networks as a service to all comers. An overwhelming majority of internet traffic now spends at least some of its journey on these networks and the physical assets – submarine and terrestrial networks – that Big Tech has built or funded to ensure their information superhighways are, well … super.

But the enormous concentration of traffic these private networks carry worries some.

The Internet Society, for example, started to measure the concentration of internet resources in December 2021, to understand whether concentration reduces the resilience of the net by creating dependencies on a small number of actors.

"Networks are becoming more and more concerned about being connected with CDNs," said Carl Gahnberg, a senior policy advisor at the Internet Society, where he focuses on internet governance. And that concentration means less resilience, as illustrated by widespread outages that occur when a big CDN or cloud goes down.

When the internet as we know it "sees" the absence of a resource, it looks for an alternative path to that resource. But when a CDN goes down – as happened to Fastly in June 2021 and Akamai in July 2021 – the impact is widespread. There is no alternative route to content the CDNs supposedly tend.

And when private operators become the dominant supplier of essential services like DNS, entire nations' internet connections can become precarious. Sovereign capability therefore becomes important.

Another reason to worry about the shrinking internet is that what benefits Big Tech doesn't automatically benefit consumers.

Mobile UK's submission to the UK Competition and Markets Authority's study on the mobile ecosystem market asserts that while customers assume Private Relay "makes everything private and harder to intercept/hack," it also removes carriers' ability to improve their own networks.

"This may stop other helpful features from working and add latency and jitter to time-sensitive applications due to everything funneling through iCloud," the submission states. "It could thus harm new edge applications, just as edge applications are starting to take off."

Carriers losing the chance to add value with networks matters, because they need to be profitable to afford the spectrum and equipment to build and operate networks.

Geoff Huston, chief scientist at APNIC, says the shrunken internet makes that hard. "The content folks are going great and the carriage folk are going broke," he told The Register.

Huston recounted how network providers tried to have content providers pay for carriage, but content providers pushed back by arguing that without content there would be no demand for carriage.

Content providers then found their own revenue streams: advertising and subscriptions. "As soon as that happened the consumer money shifted – because consumers wanted content and carriage was incidental," Huston explained.

Not all carriers worry about the increasing dominance of Big Tech’s networks.

John Reisinger, co-founder and CTO of Australian ISP Aussie Broadband, which has over 300,000 customers, directs around eighty per cent of traffic to Big Tech's networks, and doesn’t mind doing so.

"For someone our size it is quite comfortable," he told The Register. He explained that his firm can afford to arrange links to the datacenters in which Big Tech maintains its points of presence. A smaller internet also means that Aussie Broadband needs to arrange less carriage from transit providers, and can bank the savings.

"It does help keep costs down and keeps things closer to our network," he said, adding that Aussie broadband "has more control over things rather than going over other networks."

Yet Aussie Broadband has also invested significantly in onshore customer service – making that a differentiator even though it is more costly to operate.

APNIC's Huston also argued that the shrunken internet reduces the adoption of open technologies, in two ways.

One is that there's no incentive for carriers to upgrade to IPv6. He has argued that Big Tech's private networks use so much network address translation (NAT) of IPv4 that that the global uptake of IPv6 has slowed – just because the shortage of IPv4 addresses matters less. There's also no financial reason for carriers to change systems that work well.

Huston also believes that Big Tech companies have figured out that they can implement changes that matter their own networks or applications, without waiting for the rest of the world to catch up by developing a standard that delivers the same outcome.

He cites DNS as an example. After Edward Snowden's revelations, many in the tech community felt it could usefully be made less leaky, but re-working DNS would require years of collaboration and the final result could take years more to propagate.

However, Facebook's mobile apps handle DNS queries over their own private network. "The platform does not know about them, the ISP does not know it is going on, nobody can know and nothing changed in DNS," Huston lamented.

APNIC and the Registro de Direcciones de Internet de América Latina y Caribe (LACNIC) raised similar concerns in a 2021 study that, among other things, considers the Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) protocol that Google developed as an alternative to TCP, then baked it into the Chrome browser in ways that make some traffic less observable. Google at least submitted QUIC to the standards process, so hasn't tied its client and private networks quite as tightly as Facebook has done.

Google's actions also suggest that, while Big Tech will develop technology that benefits its own operations, big players also recognize they can't re-shape the shrunken classical networks to adopt their preferred specs.

But a wider point is that Big Tech can afford the combination of innovation in an application as well as the operation of private networks.

The rest of us live in Big Tech's world, and suffer at its whims.

Innovating when giant players set the rules is never easy - even for other giants. Even Facebook suffers. Apple's tech offering iThing users the chance to opt out of some tracking kicked a $10 billion hole in The Social Network's revenue.

At the time of writing, worry about the shrunken internet mostly remains just that – worry. The numerous antitrust actions against Big Tech around the world are mostly considering other matters that are enabled by Big Tech's private networks, but it is advertising markets and privacy that legislators want to change – not network architectures.

A smaller internet therefore seems set to become the norm. The Register is almost compelled to make that observation, because you're reading this article with the help of … Cloudflare. We rely on the service to safeguard our site's stability, so that this article is always easy to find and read. ®

In-brief Governments around the world should pass intellectual property laws that grant rights to AI systems, two academics at the University of New South Wales in Australia argued.

Alexandra George, and Toby Walsh, professors of law and AI, respectively, believe failing to recognize machines as inventors could have long-lasting impacts on economies and societies. 

"If courts and governments decide that AI-made inventions cannot be patented, the implications could be huge," they wrote in a comment article published in Nature. "Funders and businesses would be less incentivized to pursue useful research using AI inventors when a return on their investment could be limited. Society could miss out on the development of worthwhile and life-saving inventions."

More papers describing the orders and messages the US President can issue in the event of apocalyptic crises, such as a devastating nuclear attack, have been declassified and released for all to see.

These government files are part of a larger collection of records that discuss the nature, reach, and use of secret Presidential Emergency Action Documents: these are executive orders, announcements, and statements to Congress that are all ready to sign and send out as soon as a doomsday scenario occurs. PEADs are supposed to give America's commander-in-chief immediate extraordinary powers to overcome extraordinary events.

PEADs have never been declassified or revealed before. They remain hush-hush, and their exact details are not publicly known.

Russian crooks are selling network credentials and virtual private network access for a "multitude" of US universities and colleges on criminal marketplaces, according to the FBI.

According to a warning issued on Thursday, these stolen credentials sell for thousands of dollars on both dark web and public internet forums, and could lead to subsequent cyberattacks against individual employees or the schools themselves.

"The exposure of usernames and passwords can lead to brute force credential stuffing computer network attacks, whereby attackers attempt logins across various internet sites or exploit them for subsequent cyber attacks as criminal actors take advantage of users recycling the same credentials across multiple accounts, internet sites, and services," the Feds' alert [PDF] said.

Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft often support privacy in public statements, but behind the scenes they've been working through some common organizations to weaken or kill privacy legislation in US states.

That's according to a report this week from news non-profit The Markup, which said the corporations hire lobbyists from the same few groups and law firms to defang or drown state privacy bills.

The report examined 31 states when state legislatures were considering privacy legislation and identified 445 lobbyists and lobbying firms working on behalf of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, along with industry groups like TechNet and the State Privacy and Security Coalition.

America's financial watchdog is investigating whether Elon Musk adequately disclosed his purchase of Twitter shares last month, just as his bid to take over the social media company hangs in the balance. 

A letter [PDF] from the SEC addressed to the tech billionaire said he "[did] not appear" to have filed the proper form detailing his 9.2 percent stake in Twitter "required 10 days from the date of acquisition," and asked him to provide more information. Musk's shares made him one of Twitter's largest shareholders. The letter is dated April 4, and was shared this week by the regulator.

Musk quickly moved to try and buy the whole company outright in a deal initially worth over $44 billion. Musk sold a chunk of his shares in Tesla worth $8.4 billion and bagged another $7.14 billion from investors to help finance the $21 billion he promised to put forward for the deal. The remaining $25.5 billion bill was secured via debt financing by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others. But the takeover is not going smoothly.

Cloud security company Lacework has laid off 20 percent of its employees, just months after two record-breaking funding rounds pushed its valuation to $8.3 billion.

A spokesperson wouldn't confirm the total number of employees affected, though told The Register that the "widely speculated number on Twitter is a significant overestimate."

The company, as of March, counted more than 1,000 employees, which would push the jobs lost above 200. And the widely reported number on Twitter is about 300 employees. The biz, based in Silicon Valley, was founded in 2015.

A researcher at Cisco's Talos threat intelligence team found eight vulnerabilities in the Open Automation Software (OAS) platform that, if exploited, could enable a bad actor to access a device and run code on a targeted system.

The OAS platform is widely used by a range of industrial enterprises, essentially facilitating the transfer of data within an IT environment between hardware and software and playing a central role in organizations' industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) efforts. It touches a range of devices, including PLCs and OPCs and IoT devices, as well as custom applications and APIs, databases and edge systems.

Companies like Volvo, General Dynamics, JBT Aerotech and wind-turbine maker AES are among the users of the OAS platform.

Nvidia is expecting a $500 million hit to its global datacenter and consumer business in the second quarter due to COVID lockdowns in China and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Despite those and other macroeconomic concerns, executives are still optimistic about future prospects.

"The full impact and duration of the war in Ukraine and COVID lockdowns in China is difficult to predict. However, the impact of our technology and our market opportunities remain unchanged," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO and co-founder, during the company's first-quarter earnings call.

Those two statements might sound a little contradictory, including to some investors, particularly following the stock selloff yesterday after concerns over Russia and China prompted Nvidia to issue lower-than-expected guidance for second-quarter revenue.

HPE is lifting the lid on a new AI supercomputer – the second this week – aimed at building and training larger machine learning models to underpin research.

Based at HPE's Center of Excellence in Grenoble, France, the new supercomputer is to be named Champollion after the French scholar who made advances in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 19th century. It was built in partnership with Nvidia using AMD-based Apollo computer nodes fitted with Nvidia's A100 GPUs.

Champollion brings together HPC and purpose-built AI technologies to train machine learning models at scale and unlock results faster, HPE said. HPE already provides HPC and AI resources from its Grenoble facilities for customers, and the broader research community to access, and said it plans to provide access to Champollion for scientists and engineers globally to accelerate testing of their AI models and research.

HR and finance application vendor Workday's CEO, Aneel Bhusri, confirmed deal wins expected for the three-month period ending April 30 were being pushed back until later in 2022.

The SaaS company boss was speaking as Workday recorded an operating loss of $72.8 million in its first quarter [PDF] of fiscal '23, nearly double the $38.3 million loss recorded for the same period a year earlier. Workday also saw revenue increase to $1.43 billion in the period, up 22 percent year-on-year.

However, the company increased its revenue guidance for the full financial year. It said revenues would be between $5.537 billion and $5.557 billion, an increase of 22 percent on earlier estimates.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is lining up yet another investigation into Google over its dominance of the digital advertising market.

This latest inquiry, announced Thursday, is the second major UK antitrust investigation into Google this year alone. In March this year the UK, together with the European Union, said it wished to examine Google's "Jedi Blue" agreement with Meta to allegedly favor the former's Open Bidding ads platform.

The news also follows proposals last week by a bipartisan group of US lawmakers to create legislation that could force Alphabet's Google, Meta's Facebook, and Amazon to divest portions of their ad businesses.

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