Risk management on the internet today

- While recognizing that we have 40% of the world's population still to connect, whatever way you look at it, the internet is amazing. It continues to evolve the way we live, work, learn, and play, and with no sign of slowing down. It has significantly impacted industries like media and entertainment and brick and mortar retail, and it's reinvented others like how we manage our money and book travel. And for many, it has changed how and where we now work. The internet has been a big deal and it continues to be. In fact, the most disruptive days of the internet are likely still ahead of us. Some analysts, including me, will argue quite convincingly that we're still in the opening act of internet innovation. Of course, it's easy to focus on all the positives of the internet. For example, it has created low cost communications across much of the world, lowered the barriers to setting up and running a global online business, and it's providing new ways to access healthcare information and services. But we're kidding ourselves if we don't recognize that this vast network of networks has some stubborn problems associated with it. Beyond some of the obvious, such as online fraud, misinformation, outages, and hacking, the internet often struggles with the fundamental challenges of trust. This can't be overstated. The history of humanity and much of its success has relied on models of trust. With the internet, we confront challenges such as knowing whether the person you are doing business with online really is who they say they are, or determining if an online service is real, or if private information being shared will be kept confidential. I'm sure you can think of many other trust issues like these. Despite these challenges, we've done wonders reducing risk and building trust with existing technology. More of us are using stronger passwords, multi-factor authentication, and biometrics such as our fingerprints and faces to gain access to systems. We have security technologies such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, digital certificates, and captures, those quirky requests that require us to prove we're human by identifying text or objects in an image, something bots still can't do, at least not yet. With these mechanisms and others for security and trust, we've come a long way. And yet, issues persist. For example, business systems and databases continue to be compromised, made unavailable, and money, information, and identities are stolen. Without more rigorous online tools to increase trust and reduce risk, innovation will be impacted, and at worst, held back from meaningful progress. If we want ironclad convenience, online voting that people will trust and use, workable long-term digital currencies, self-driving cars that securely negotiate with each other, improved and seamless methods to authenticate identity and more, we're going to need a more secure and trustworthy internet. Security innovation continues to move at a frenetic pace. Fortunately, new ideas are emerging all the time, sometimes in surprising ways. That's what happened with the introduction of Bitcoin. The solution that is enabled the success of Bitcoin and almost all the cryptocurrencies that have followed is fundamentally a novel security and trust mechanism. That technology? Well, that would be the distributed ledger, or blockchain, as we now refer to it. What blockchain technology achieved was the notion of trustless architecture. Put another way, trust will be a feature of software code and not that of human intervention. It's a big idea and it works. While blockchain enabled cryptocurrency to function in a trust manner, this core quality has made it valuable in a large number of contexts. In fact, in the next chapter of internet innovation, we may have blockchain to thank for opening some new doors.