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Biggest Threats to the Internet? Hint: It is not Cyber Attacks
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00:30on threats to the internet.
00:33Now, we're really lucky to have two great panelists
00:37here with us today.
00:39We have Matthew Prince, who is CEO and co-founder
00:42of Cloudflare, a public company that
00:44offers content delivery, network services, and cloud
00:48network infrastructure and security.
00:51The company's tagline is, we make the internet work
00:55the way it should.
00:58Nadev Zafir is co-founder of Team 8, an Israeli venture
01:02capital firm, and prior to founding Team 8, he served
01:06as commander of Unit 8200, Israel's elite military unit,
01:12which is recognized as the informal talent incubator
01:16for the nation's tech industry.
01:18and he established the Israel Defense Forces Cyber Command.
01:25Now, threats to the internet are nothing new.
01:30The possibility of internet fragmentation was first discussed
01:35in the 1990s, before ICANN existed, when the main transport protocol,
01:41TCPIP, and the domain name system were challenged by alternatives.
01:45In the late 1990s, the rise of private peering, and the interest of telcos,
01:51was said to threaten the emerging world wide web, with internet balkanization.
01:56Before ICANN introduced internationalized domain names, there was a fear that the internet
02:01would fall apart along language lines, and in the 2000s, there was a serious discussion
02:07about whether the emerging internet of things would need a separate object naming system.
02:14Today, we're looking at some new threats, and some serious ones,
02:20and Matthew and Nadev are going to tell us about them.
02:23So, Nadev, let me start with you.
02:26What do you see as the biggest threats to the internet today?
02:30Well, Jennifer, I think you need to zoom out for one second in order to talk about the future threat.
02:36If you all remember, perhaps most of the people in the crowd are too young to remember,
02:41but the internet was actually designated by DARPA as the unfailable, sort of the most resilient
02:49command and control infrastructure, literally for nuclear wars with the Soviet Union.
02:55And in that sense, it's probably worked fabulously well, and I think the internet is probably,
03:01as a command and control system, as an infrastructure, probably today more resilient than any other system,
03:08and probably better than they expected.
03:11But then in the 90s, we introduced it to the masses, and all of a sudden, we said,
03:16wow, this is great.
03:17Now everybody could get access to data, and consume data wherever they are,
03:24and we're democratizing data.
03:26We thought the world would become flat, and that was internet 1.0.
03:30Then 9-11 happened.
03:32And we realized that, you know, this beautiful thing that has been created also has the threat side.
03:38Fast forward 2007, internet 2.0, smartphones, cloud, we all became prosumers, social networks,
03:46you know, we brought Athens to the world.
03:49Awesome.
03:51And then we realized that, well, there's some threat that comes with that as well,
03:56because can we trust everything that's happening in this great new town hall,
04:00that has globalized and democratized everything?
04:05And that created a trust issue that I think we're dealing with now.
04:09Looking ahead, I think there are three threats to the internet.
04:12Number one is just the same old trust, right?
04:16With AI, Gen AI, et cetera.
04:19Just imagine what bots can do.
04:21And at some point, that could lead to the internet becoming so untrusted
04:27that we will go back to the 80s and get these enclaves or islands of trusted areas
04:32that we will need to verify and we will need to pay for it,
04:35just like the, you know, the double click that we need to do in Twitter now.
04:39We need to pay for it just to make sure that it's a real person, right?
04:43And that can take us back to the have and have nots.
04:47All of a sudden, only if you're in the right place at the right time
04:49with the right resources and the right education,
04:51you can actually trust what you're consuming and what you're producing into the internet.
04:56So that's threat number one.
04:58Threat number two, I think, is tech.
05:00If you think about the next decade or so, if we get, for example,
05:04quantum computing emerging, all of a sudden we have a threat
05:08to the encryption model of the internet.
05:10Without the encryption model, the internet is, for e-commerce, for example,
05:15becomes useless.
05:17And number three, I think, is a growth sort of threat to the internet,
05:21is just energy.
05:23We're already consuming about 10% of the world energy for compute,
05:26and it's rising very fast.
05:28So I would say those are the three threats, and we haven't spoken about cyber.
05:35Okay.
05:35So, Matthew, what's your take?
05:38You know, when we first started talking about this panel,
05:42I said it wouldn't be fun unless we actually got on a fight in stage.
05:46And so it's great that I actually disagree with Nadav right out of the bat, which is a good start
05:53to any panel.
05:54You know, I'll start with what is, I think, a miracle, which is that the internet exists at all.
06:00The fact that we've been able to connect people around the world.
06:05And the 40 years leading up to 2016, you know, I've been trying to figure out what a good metaphor
06:10for them is.
06:12And I apologize for this being a very American metaphor, but it works surprisingly well around the world,
06:17which is, it's sort of like episode four of Star Wars.
06:21A new hope, right?
06:23There was this incredible thing, but instead of it being the force, it was the internet.
06:28There were these people that had special powers over it, but instead of being Jedi, they were developers and web
06:35administrators.
06:35And if you go back and actually watch that movie, it's a really bad movie.
06:41It's incredibly naive. It's incredibly simplistic.
06:44Somehow this person who has never flown a plane is able to close his eyes and blow up this massive
06:50force out there,
06:53which is the Death Star and, you know, take on the empire.
06:56And yet that's exactly what the internet did.
06:59And it's hard to overstate how much a threat to traditional sources of power it's been,
07:04to government, to the media, to religion, to the family.
07:10All of those things, to education, all of those things have very much been threatened by the internet.
07:16And I think 2016 was this interesting turning point.
07:19Lots of things happened in 2016.
07:20Brexit happened in 2016. The Trump election happened in 2016.
07:24There were a lot of conflicts across Asia in 2016.
07:28The thing that I point to is that in 2016, and this is, again, more cause than, or effect than
07:34cause,
07:34but in 2016, the Associated Press said we no longer had to capitalize the I in internet anymore.
07:42And what I think that represented as a turning point is it went from us thinking of this as a
07:46miracle
07:46to thinking of this as something that we just take for granted.
07:50Like electricity.
07:51Like electricity or whatever, and we don't capitalize that.
07:53But I think that that's actually a real risk.
07:56Because, yes, there are real challenges around trust.
08:00There are real challenges around, you know, things like quantum computing.
08:03But we can solve those at some level.
08:05I think that the bigger challenge is that those traditional sources of power are trying to put the internet back
08:11in the box.
08:12And after episode four of Star Wars was episode five, and that's The Empire Strikes Back.
08:17And it's a pretty dark movie.
08:18Hopefully, again, no spoilers.
08:21But, you know, the protagonist falls in love with a girl that gets stolen away from the person he thinks
08:27is his best friend,
08:28who turns out doesn't even like the girl that much.
08:31The best friend, rogue best friend, gets encased in some plastic black stuff.
08:36The girl gets sold off to slug slavery.
08:38Meanwhile, the protagonist realizes that his mortal enemy is his father, loses his hand.
08:45And the movie ends with everyone going in different directions, feeling very much alone.
08:49And unfortunately, I think that the next 40 years are going to be those fights.
08:55And it's going to be a very lonely time.
08:57And what we see in places like Russia right now, what we see in places like Iran,
09:02what we see when Turkey shuts the internet down ahead of its elections,
09:05that's those sources of power trying to put the internet back in the box.
09:09And I think that that's the thing that I'm the most worried about over the next 40 years.
09:15By the way, you're blacklisted in Russia, right? And why?
09:19Well, you know, so in December of 2021, we started to see in Disha of what were the early signs
09:31of what Russia does before they launch an attack.
09:34And unfortunately, Cloudflare's been around for 13 years, and we've seen Russia launch attacks in Georgia.
09:40We've seen Russia launch attacks in Ukraine with Crimea in 2014.
09:45We've seen Russia launch attacks in Syria.
09:47And so we know what their fingerprints look like before they do that.
09:50And so we briefed Western officials and said, an attack is coming.
09:55And from December, mid-December of 2021, I felt a little bit like Chicken Little saying the sky is falling,
10:03the sky is falling, but it wasn't actually.
10:05The good news was that we were able to use that time in order to onboard a lot of Ukrainian
10:11government and civil society organizations onto Cloudflare.
10:14A number of other tech companies like Microsoft and Google stepped up to protect their infrastructure as well.
10:19And so when, unfortunately, in February, February 24th of 2022, the Russian attack finally did come, we were able to
10:27help keep them online.
10:28And that pissed Russia off.
10:29At the same time, we've been able to make sure that the Western media and the critics of Putin, like
10:37the Navalny Foundation, Bellingcat, can still be accessed by the average Russian citizen.
10:43And Cloudflare provides the technology to be able to do that.
10:46And we've created a real problem for Russia because they can't block us without blocking access to the APIs for
10:53the oil and gas markets that they need.
10:55But if they don't block us, then the Navalny Foundation and Bellingcat and others can talk about how corrupt the
11:02Putin regime was.
11:03And so, you know, I was somewhat surprised where about a year ago I got notice from our team saying
11:09that I'd been personally sanctioned by Russia.
11:13And I actually think that's a badge of honor that we're doing the right thing.
11:16But make no mistake, Russia is trying right now to recreate what China already has.
11:22And China, you know, whatever you think about China, they were very, very smart at recognizing the threat that the
11:29Internet had to their system of government and their regime.
11:32And they never let it out of the box.
11:35Other places, everywhere else on earth did.
11:37And right now the biggest fight on the Internet is going to be whether Russia can recreate China, whether they
11:43can start filtering things the way that China does.
11:46Whether Iran can do the same, whether Turkey can do the same, whether Egypt can do the same.
11:51And as that happens, I think that that's an enormous risk for the Internet that a lot of us have
11:57come to just expect to the extent that we feel comfortable not even capitalizing the eye on it.
12:03What, you know, as I mentioned at the beginning of the discussion, there's been fear about the Balkanization of the
12:11Internet for a long time and it hasn't happened.
12:14What is it about this current moment that makes you feel like maybe we're going to go tip the balance
12:23and be tipped?
12:23Well, I think, you know, the first thing is that I think that for very legitimate reasons, we are starting
12:33to see what some of Nadav described as the challenge of the Internet.
12:38You know, a lot of tech companies feel like they had a bait and switch where they you thought you
12:44were the consumer, but really you were the product and they were selling your data.
12:48A lot of bad things have been enabled enabled by technology.
12:53And so I think for some very good reasons, governments and organizations around the world are saying, well, maybe we
13:00need to put some controls in place.
13:01And I think that's exactly right. But I think as we do that, we have to be really careful.
13:05So I'll give you a specific example. In Leipzig, Germany, a few months ago, a court in Leipzig, an organization
13:13called Quad9, which is a DNS, an underlying infrastructure provider, got sued by Sony.
13:20And the suit was that they wanted to block Quad9 from letting you be able to get to some music
13:27pirate websites.
13:29And Quad9 has no relationship directly with the music pirate websites, but they provide core infrastructure.
13:34And so if they can block it there, then it will block it for a wide swath of Quad9 users.
13:39And the court in Leipzig said, we're going to do that. We're going to block that.
13:43And again, I think that the court in Leipzig has absolutely the right to do that.
13:47But the challenge was Sony came back and they said, well, the challenge is if you just block it in
13:52the jurisdiction around Leipzig or even if you just block it in all of Germany, users can use VPNs.
13:57Right.
13:58And they can pretend like they're coming from Montana and they can still get to the pirated website.
14:03And so you need to not only block it in this area, but you need to block it around the
14:08entire world.
14:08And by the way, if you don't do that, the court said, you're going to face fines for us for
14:13every day and potentially even criminal penalties.
14:17And so what do they do?
14:20And you might think, well, that's fine.
14:21Germany, we're in France.
14:24Germany is sort of all part of the European Union and maybe music piracy is bad.
14:28But if you look at what's going on in Montana, which is a state in the United States that actually
14:32has 10% more land mass than all of Germany, has about twice the population of Leipzig.
14:39Right.
14:39So it's tiny population, giant state.
14:42They just banned TikTok because they think TikTok is bad.
14:46Again, you might agree.
14:48You might disagree.
14:48But by that exact same logic, a court in Montana can now ban TikTok globally because a Montana resident might
14:55be able to pretend that they're in Germany.
14:58And so I think with really good intentions, almost like Jar Jar Binks sort of stumbling through the world, I
15:05think legislators and courts are doing exactly what the Russians and the Iranians and others would want to do.
15:13Again, for good intentions.
15:15But what we need to be very careful of is that as we do correct some of the real problems
15:21that are out there, we make sure that we're not shutting down what has still, to me, been one of
15:27the incredible miracles, which is the Internet.
15:30So Nadav, what's a bigger threat to you?
15:33Is it, you know, government in the courts or is it this, you know, lack of trust and inability, once
15:43we have deep fakes, you know, fueled by Gen AI, inability to discern the truth?
15:52Well, I think Matthew's right in the sense that the Internet has changed everything.
15:57And I think Internet 2.0 was about taking separate domains of our lives and doing what we used to
16:06call digital transformation that is optimizing them, making them better, more secure, faster, et cetera.
16:12And it's worked wonderfully.
16:14I mean, look at COVID-19.
16:16Just imagine COVID-19 without the Internet, right?
16:21All you have to do is go 100 years back to 1918.
16:25But, you know, the Internet, if you'd have asked me before COVID-19, hey, this global epidemic is going to
16:32happen.
16:32Ninety percent of the workforce is going to go home overnight and start doing these video conferences over these platforms.
16:40And the world will continue running on that.
16:42I would tell you, Jennifer, look, you're naive.
16:45That's not going to happen.
16:46But the Internet turned out, our digital infrastructure turned out to be much more, you know, resilient than we anticipated.
16:53And that's great.
16:55And here we are after the pandemic, you know, a lot of good things happen.
16:59However, we're now entering what I call Internet 3.0, where it's not just taking separate domains of our lives
17:08and optimizing them through digital transformation.
17:12This is now transformation period, and everything is converging.
17:16And so the Internet becomes critical infrastructure period.
17:22We're going to be running our energy on the Internet.
17:24Our hospitals run on the Internet.
17:27Everything is running on the Internet.
17:29And it's a complex situation.
17:31I mean, if you take the Russian situation, for example, what do we know now for a fact?
17:36I mean, we suspected this for a long time.
17:38But now we know that in Russia, you can't really differentiate between state-sponsored cyber attacks, criminals.
17:46The whole thing is converging.
17:47And so this convergence creates, I think, a new model where the threats are at a different level.
17:55So, you know, number one to your point is what is the cost of all this if we need to
18:01now do what we call zero trust, right?
18:04So zero trust means, you know, the three of us just met this morning.
18:08We have some point of trust.
18:10Will that trust and what was the cost of that trust?
18:12It was pretty minimal.
18:13What about 5, 10, 20 years from now where we need to spend a lot just to get the minimal
18:19trust between each other?
18:21And so the cost of doing business rises dramatically.
18:24So that's number one.
18:25Number two, with the convergence of the physical and the cyber, you know, right after the war,
18:32if the Russians turn back at the West or this deglobalization and polarization that we have right now,
18:39will our lights go out just like the Russians did in 2017 when they went after the finance industry in
18:46Ukraine,
18:46sort of as a cyber prelude to the very kinetic war that we have right now.
18:51And so, number one, trust.
18:53And I agree that we can solve that, right?
18:56So, for example, we were chatting about this this morning.
18:58We have new forms of encryption.
19:01For example, homomorphic encryption that's led by Professor Shafi Goldwasser, right?
19:05These are sort of miracle new technologies that will enable us not to do zero trust but to go beyond
19:12trust, right?
19:13We can also solve the convergence if we understand that this is a critical infrastructure
19:18and we need to look at OT and IoT and the connection between cyber and physical
19:22and look at everything in a holistic manner.
19:25I do think that governments have a role to play here.
19:28I think governments will need to not just come with a stick but also with what are the expected outcomes
19:36and how can we incentivize organizations, enterprise, just like Matthew did in the war in Ukraine,
19:42just like Microsoft did in the war in Ukraine.
19:45Leaders will have to choose sides in this new transformation that the world is leading us into.
19:52So, what's the scenario looking forward?
19:55Let's say looking 10 years forward, what's the dark scenario and what's a more positive one?
20:02I mean, and how can the people in this room help contribute to, you know, safeguarding the future of the
20:10Internet?
20:10You know, I think that, again, in sort of the naive episode 4 version of the Internet,
20:18sort of the Internet was going to break down national boundaries
20:21and their governments wouldn't matter anymore and it would, like, that is a naive version.
20:28Governments still matter, courts still matter, the rule of law is still absolutely critical.
20:33And so, the right answer is not ignore the courts.
20:36The right answer is not ignore the Leipzig court, but I do think some things are important.
20:40Rule of law matters and what that means is that the people that a legislature, that a government,
20:47that a court can enforce should have a say in what that court does.
20:51And so, Leipzig, the Leipzig court should be able to enforce an order inside Germany.
20:56And that's totally legitimate.
20:58But, and when they do that, they should be incredibly transparent about this particular site violates the laws of Germany.
21:05Therefore, you can't access it in Germany.
21:09And if you don't like that, you as a citizen of Germany should be able to petition to do otherwise.
21:14And if we can defend that there's a sovereign right of Germans to regulate what content is available in Germany,
21:23but it infringes on the sovereign rights of Poland and France and Canada and Thailand,
21:30if all of a sudden that court does that for the entire rest of the world.
21:35I think that's the positive outcome that we can get to, which is a much closer relationship between governments and
21:42technology
21:42and an appreciation of fundamental principles of rule of law, transparency, consistency, accountability.
21:48The dark side is sort of the Teletubbies internet, which is that if all of a sudden every single jurisdiction
21:56around the world can say,
21:58I don't like this, so it's banned, all of a sudden we are going to fall to what the lowest
22:04common denominator is.
22:05And if you don't know, Teletubbies is this inane kids' TV show.
22:10But even that, you know, a pastor in South Carolina in the United States thought one of the characters on
22:17it was gay,
22:18so tried to get it banned.
22:19So we may not even have that.
22:21And so I think the real long-term stable equilibrium is we have to have a respect for legislators.
22:28We have to have a respect for courts.
22:30We have to have a respect for governments.
22:31We have to understand that governments have the sovereign right to regulate the networks that are inside their borders,
22:38but that their rules can't extend beyond that.
22:41And if we do that, then yeah, the internet might look a little bit different in Germany than it does
22:46in France.
22:47It might look a little bit different in various places.
22:49And if we set a human rights floor that says, that's the case, but in Russia we're going to try
22:54and keep the lights on for journalists and reporters no matter what.
22:58I think that that's the stable equilibrium where we can address some of the concerns that Navad rightly points out.
23:06But keep the miracle that is the internet.
23:09And my one ask for everyone is, if you care about the internet, if you make your livelihood using the
23:14internet,
23:15capitalize the I in internet, because it's one simple act of rebellion that can show that you actually want there
23:22to be one internet,
23:23that it's still a miracle, and that it's incredible that it brings us together today.
23:28Thanks, Matthew. Nedav, you have the last word. Tell us what you see as a potential positive scenario,
23:36and what can the people in the room do?
23:39Look, for the innovators in the room, in order to avoid the dark side,
23:44I agree that a splinternet or a balkanization of the internet is bad for all of us.
23:50I'm not sure it's, it may be inevitable, but there's still a large pool of people that will be a
23:56part of the internet
23:57with a capital I, as Matthew said. In order to keep that internet with a capital I alive,
24:03it's not just about data residency, it's also about morals.
24:08And we as individuals, leaders of companies, doesn't matter if it's startups or the incumbents,
24:14we'll need to create a moral ground for the internet to actually remain somewhere where we have a minimum amount
24:21of trust.
24:22It's never going to be perfect, but I agree, we need to keep the lights up,
24:27because we don't want to go back to pre-internet days.
24:30OK, thank you. And with that, could we please have a nice round of applause for Matthew and Nedav.
24:36Thank you.
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