What would an article be if it didn’t mention AI? 🤦‍♂️

A bit of a pick and mix issue this time. I wanted to get a couple of subjects written down before I forgot or moved on to other matters.

I talk mostly about infrastructure in this issue, IXPs, domains, and so forth. But there’s a way too short discussion on digital sovereignty which merits much deeper analysis, and I hope to dig in at some point in the future.

As always, thanks for reading and let me know what you think.

Enjoy!

Potential Caribbean collateral damage in an AI crash

If there has ever been a product or service that has been hyped to levels previously unseen, it is Artificial Intelligence. Regardless of which type of AI we’re talking about, it seems to occupy a space in-between a little bit of usefulness in some areas, to the wildest dreams even Science Fiction writers couldn’t dream up. And the systematic dumbing down and mis-attribution to AI of what is actually being used has been exploited to death for the profit of the few, and to the detriment of the many, in my view. I’ve discussed my thoughts on AI, and I stand by my position that calling everything AI is not only stupid, but potentially dangerous.

Additionally, I don’t think it is controversial to state that the promises of ‘AI’ have been over-blown ¹ and that the ROI is starting to look a little sketchy, although perhaps not in enough time and force before the AI oligarchs cash out with their shady IPOs.² Let alone the amount of digital asbestos we’re baking in to apps currently been vibe-coded by the token maxxing bros.^{3 4} But we’re starting to get into the next phase of evaluation, where companies, journalists (FT as an example of a high profile publication) and influential individuals are starting to expect more from the tools based on what has been promised, and the tools are just not capable of delivering consistently and accurately. Sure, the technology is cool, but world-changing or crisis-solving good? Clearly not, and it is not going unnoticed.

The whole industry is starting to look more like wish-casting than solid business fundamentals of a good product that fits a need, and that need is large and pervasive. And here’s the crucial part, that its costs are marginal enough to ensure the companies make a profit. You know, a real business! The parallels to the Web3, Crypto, Blockchain scammers is uncanny, and again, I’m not the first to point this out. But number go up, even if it is pure fantasy.

But like so many of these types of things, the FOMO, the religiosity and greed outweigh all reasonable evaluation and critical thinking. Because so many boosters are so visible all the time, people who should know better are duped into ‘believing’ and enter into a business with little to no expertise and a belief that they’ll be the exceptional one that doesn’t get scammed. It rarely works out.

But there’s another angle to this, something closer to home. There is one country that has been the beneficiary of this insane Tulip Mania ⁵.

Anguilla.

If you don’t know, Anguilla is the designated owner of the .ai ccTLD domain. So each time you visit a site with .ai at the end, it will have been purchased (rented, in reality) from the small island’s internet registry. To give you can idea of the scale, Anguilla earned just over $85 million US last year, out of a nominal GDP of around $415 million US, according to UN estimates. So around 20% of GDP. That’s a big chunk of the economy. And it fuelled around 50% of the government’s revenue. ⁶ Prices on .ai domains are ludicrous at the moment, with asking prices often over ten times the amount for the same name of domain but as a .org or .com.

But this market is showing signs of a pause, with transaction volume declining 3% this year compared to last, and the talk of “bubble” becoming louder more frequent.⁷ Despite some natural consolidation in there, the underlying fear is that a real bubble burst could have a significant effect on Anguilla’s economy through the decimation of the .ai domain rental business. Imagine having 20% of your income taken away. It’s going to hurt. That’s something akin to 3 Brexit’s-worth of GDP destruction.

I hope they haven’t put all their eggs in one basket, otherwise they’re going to have to dig deeper in offshore fraud services, sorry, financial services.

Digital Sovereignty. Don’t confuse with Nationalism.

For all the talk —justified or not— about digital sovereignty, and as something that I have been part of, I should be clear about my stance, the dangers of overplaying sovereign things, and how quickly that can devolve into nationalism and far right politics faster than we can do anything to prevent negative outcomes of a nationalistic far-right driven Internet.

It is a difficult subject because it is so damn complicated. Yes. There should be sovereign tech. No. Tech shouldn’t be used for nationalism or fascism and uses beyond those that are beneficial to the public.

But there in lies the problem. What we’ve so naively enabled, is an industry that has shown its true colours lately, by becoming entirely embedded in a nationalistic and authoritarian project. From the use and abuse of facial recognition technologies in cameras that surveil and wrongly arrest innocent people, making incorrect decisions about their right to access a place or a service, to the abuse of data that was hitherto difficult, if not impossible to access across sectors and departments, enabling automated conclusions that could seriously put in danger whole swathes of the population.

Of course it was good to have some data being used for citizens benefit, but when it is employed to restrict and oppress, it suddenly becomes the tool of Neo-fascist project. And there are plenty of examples in and around the Caribbean that are dangerously teetering on the brink of this outcome. Perhaps the one saving grace is the total chaotic nature of the regulations in place across the Caribbean. I’ve advocated, and still do, for a harmonisation of much of the regulation when it comes to digital technologies. But I am now much more sensitive to the possibility for that to be poorly written, badly implemented, and at risk of digital colonialism gaining a strong foothold, which, would be detrimental to people in the region. I would advocate for something more like the European Union model, which despite its flaws it is currently one of the models that seems to be more egalitarian and democratic, if sclerotic in implementation. But hang on. I’m not advocating for a copy/paste of the EU in the Caribbean, merely some inspiration of the form and the democratic and social values of the EU. The Caribbean is uniquely placed, through the toils of history, and it could easily surmount some of the local difficulties, if there were political will. Which there isn’t currently. Some premiers seem hell-bent on being the Caribbean MAGA, in what I consider shameful behaviour.

And that saddens me.

RIP IXP?

There has been a lot of effort and work put into developing the IXP infrastructure in the Caribbean. But recent trends are starting to indicate that this might have been all in vain.

If you’re not familiar with IXPs, they are essentially routing infrastructure and legal agreements between parties, usually Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that when faced with ‘local’ traffic, route that traffic through the local IXP rather than routing it through the global network and in most cases provoking that that traffic exists the local area and re-enters after taking a round-the-houses route to get back to the user. It speeds up the Internet for users and keep costs of international ingress/egress down. Yep. It costs money to send internet traffic around the world!

But recent trends in the way operators and large-scale internet companies —think of a word beginning with ‘M’ and ending with ‘a’— are developing are calling into question the very existence of IXPs. No panic! IXPs are not going to disappear tomorrow, if at all. But some very real commercial decisions are having an impact and causing some of these companies to deploy caches (or distribution points) at the regional level, thus nulling the need to local-level IXPs, in their eyes. That puts pressure on the IXPs as they become more and more relegated to route less and less traffic, and therefore become less and less useful. The ISPs don’t care too much either. In fact just judging their implication in Caribbean IXPs should give you pause for thought. Absence is the word that springs to mind.⁸

I remember when I was researching some of the infrastructure around the Caribbean for a large-scale report, and through a personal acquaintance, I spoke to an infrastructure manager at a large multi-national ISP and content provider (that extra part is important). He bluntly told me that they had no interest in participating in the IXP system, as they could simply give Google, or Meta, or any large internet content company and call, and have them send over a cache to slap into their rack. For free. Isn’t capitalism great?

It appears to me that not only on the surface of the Internet, but in the user-facing areas, there is an all-out war on your eyeballs so they can dominate and control our use of the Internet absolutely, utterly, and completely. And at the same time that war is being carried out in the backroom engineering departments of those same organisations to control the global Internet over and above that of world governments. And believe me, they will not stop, unless they are regulated to do so.

I’m not going to make a judgment here (just yet) on whether IXPs are “good” technology or not. But what I will say, is that it is much more complicated and nuanced that most would imagine, and that many parties have skin in the game, or to put it another way, personally enriching incentives, to promote their side of the story.

I’m currently still researching a number of aspects of this debate, which is much wider than routing crap from Instagram to your smartphone. I’ll be back with more.

I hope you enjoy my writing and if you wish to reach out, please do.

Peace.