Thoughts on the Clean Network program

The U.S. Secretary of State, Michael R. Pompeo, sent a brief on August 5th, 2020, announcing the expansion of an initiative called the Clean Network Program. According to the brief, the program’s aim is “guarding our citizens’ privacy and our companies’ most sensitive information”.

Some of the steps it proposes are not aligned with that aim and, more importantly, they are damaging to the fundamental architecture of the Internet. The very first line of effort it lists is:

Clean Carrier: To ensure untrusted People’s Republic of China (PRC) carriers are not connected with U.S. telecommunications networks.

Interconnection of different networks is the physical underpinning on which the Internet, with all of its services and opportunities, is built. By hindering that interconnection, this initiative strikes at the heart of the Internet as an enterprise. It also puts it at risk in ways which will have a number of unintended and deleterious effects.

This program will force traffic between the two countries to traverse third-country networks, which necessarily increases the general risks of surveillance of private communications and of traffic manipulation. This is contrary both to the stated aims of the initiative and to the interests of all who use the network. It will also, given the loss of capacity, drive up costs for everyone using the network capacity through those third countries, which could hinder the economy of the U.S. and its trading partners. The loss of capacity in direct connections will also increase the fragility of the Internet as a whole, as there will be fewer available paths when natural disasters, fiber cuts, or other equipment issues affect the remaining paths.

I urge the administration to reconsider this program, and I encourage anyone evaluating it to consider carefully the long-term impact on the Internet’s resilience, privacy, and ability to grow. The Internet has given us all the ability to trade ideas, inventions, and expressions of hope across the span of the world. At this moment in our global history, it needs fostering and support across both the U.S. and the wider world. Programs with that aim would be far more useful and far more welcome.