Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 12, No. 11, November 2024 

Nick Aldwin via Flickr

By Tim Sell

If we’ve learned anything in the last three years, it’s that open borders don’t work. They put American citizens at risk. Why haven’t we learned, over the last thirty years, that an open Internet causes the same problems? I read about problems everyday from Russian hackers and Iranian agents creating election havoc and stealing identities and money. About a year ago, I experienced bank fraud and identity theft. When I reported this to my local police department, I was told nothing could be done,
as the attack came from “overseas” on the Internet.

As a retired Air Force computer engineer, I’ve been providing Internet support since 1989. Back when the Internet was managed by the Defense Department, we had a very simple method of controlling inappropriate content. We simply messaged the support staff at the offending location and they took action to resolve the problem. Then in 1991, Congress passed legislation (the Gore bill), to open up the Internet to private enterprise. Since that time, there has been no governance of the Internet and the Internet has become a wide-open cesspool of crime, porn, scams, lies, etc. As a result, a multi-billion-dollar industry has sprung up to protect Internet users from all the criminals lurking out there. A quick review of today’s news will show that this approach is not working.

Believe it or not, there is a simple and easy solution to this problem. At its core, the Internet is a massive maze of high-speed fiber connections. Your Internet content travels these cables managed by high-performance specialized computers called routers. A router has many different connections and is programmed to select the best path for your traffic. Any Internet traffic that comes from “overseas” has to cross the border. We can easily control all “overseas” traffic by directing the routers to limit
traffic that connect to overseas cables.

I’m proposing simple legislation that requires Internet providers to manage all traffic that crosses our border. Any country that does not cooperate with American law enforcement, like China, Russia, Iran, will have all their traffic blocked at the border. We also need Internet providers to save traffic logs from all “overseas” traffic for at least thirty days, so Internet crimes can be fully investigated. Cooperating countries will need to prevent traffic from blocked countries from being routed through their networks. Countries that fail to manage criminal traffic from other countries may have all their traffic blocked.

The American marketplace is huge, which is why tariffs work so well. The American Internet is also huge, with many important services provided here. Imagine the impact to the rest of the world if we stand up and say, cooperate with our law enforcement or get out.

Please contact your representatives in Congress and demand action to clean up the Internet.

Tim Sell began his computer career in 1976, working on flight simulators. His first experience with the Internet was working for Intergraph on CAD systems in the late 1980s. He worked as an Air Force Computer Engineer from 1994 to 2020, where he rose to Senior Computer Engineer, GS-14, leading the support team at the Air Force Research Laboratory Supercomputing Resource Center. He holds Bachelor degrees in Electronics Engineering and Computer Engineering, and is a IEEE Life Member.