‘No such thing as net neutrality’ with IoT: technology expert

OTTAWA — Concern about the equal treatment of all data transmitted over the Internet is going to have to take a backseat with the Internet of Things (IoT), a California-based technology-security expert said at the Government Technology Exhibition and Conference (GTEC) in Ottawa on Tuesday. Tyson Macaulay, chief technology officer with Intel Corp.'s telecommunications security division, said during a panel discussion about the IoT: "On the IoT, there's no such thing as net neutrality. ... Your email is simply not as important as a voice call from a health-monitoring system for an elderly person. Or your track-of-control information related to your car that's moving down the highway really has to get more priority over your 14-year-old son's Facebook." If net neutrality ends up being held up as a priority by regulators in the development of the IoT, it "has the potential to upset a very fragile and a growing industry," Macaulay said. Another issue he said could disrupt growth of the IoT is the recent decision of the European Court of Justice that the so-called Safe Harbor agreement between the United States and the European Union, which governs how U.S. companies handle Europeans' personal data, is insufficient in protecting personal information from government authorities. "That will take a lot of IoT business risks and blow it up," Macaulay said. "I don't know what's going to happen. I'm quite curious to see what this is going to do to the evolution of IoT, particularly in Europe." During this panel discussion, Jonathan Reichental, chief information officer for the City of Palo Alto in California, said: "The Internet of Things is a really, really big deal. The Internet of Things in the government context and the city context is a huge deal ... equivalent to the Internet, perhaps bigger over time." Reichental said the IoT is leading to a society of self-driving vehicles, garbage cans that transmit signals when they are full and Internet-connected infrastructure for controlling energy usage, among other things. "I would say in the years ahead we will expect everything to be connected," he said. "Today, if we wanted to adjust the lights in this room, we'd scramble to find the device to do that. ... These lights will be connected in the future, and a mobile device — whatever form that takes — will adjust them." Reichental said there will be more devices connected to the IoT in the future than people currently expect. Cisco Systems Inc. estimates on its website that 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020, which is about 6.5 things for every person based on the World Bank projection for a global population of 7.67 billion by 2020. David Wolfe, a University of Toronto professor and co-director of the school's Innovation Policy Lab, said much more bandwidth will be needed for the IoT to reach its potential. "We're planning bandwidth for downloading Netflix movies; that's our conception of intensive use of bandwidth at the moment," he said. "But that's not the kind of bandwidth we're talking about through controlling health-monitoring systems, through regulating energy transmission and energy consumption through smart meters or smart grids, or controlling global production networks from control centres." Wolf added: "A country that lags behind, that gets left behind on the bandwidth issue is really going to miss the boat completely around the Internet of Things." Trajan Schulzke, director of Industry Canada's Service Lab, which assists businesses in innovation matters, said the government is aware of this issue and is working on it. "Canada is actually looking at these issues because without the bandwidth, of course, this all goes quiet," he said. Macaulay said making the IoT secure remains a challenge. "The thing that keeps me up at night is we don't know what we don't know, including the area of security," he said. "There are a whole range of areas where we're feeling our way in the dark, areas like: 'How do you authenticate devices and get them online or which devices have got vulnerabilities that can result in very serious cascading effects into other areas of the infrastructure and trigger cyber-physical impacts?' "And a lot of this we don't understand at all, and we're learning hard lessons. What I'm afraid of is that, either personally or as a society, we're going to learn some very hard lessons. And that will not only result in losses in financial and property ... it will also set back the evolution of the IoT and therefore the social gains that we stand to experience from the IoT." The Office of the Privacy Commissioner said in June that it would be issuing some reports on privacy issues related to the IoT this summer. Office spokeswoman Tobi Cohen said in an email this month that the current expectation is for these papers to be released within the next few months. — With reporting by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca and editing by Shruti Shekar at sshekar@thewirereport.ca

‘No such thing as net neutrality’ with IoT: technology expert

Broadcast | October 20, 2015

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